When Deborah Thurber got married, it seemed like the perfect time to change her middle name.
Since she was taking her husband, Steven’s last name, she figured why not replace her middle one, Pauline, with something more meaningful – like Shakespeare. Now it’s no secret that Thurber, is kind of a Shakespeare enthusiast (to say the least). She has spent 25 years running Project Shakespeare, including the last decade-plus in Jaffrey, but she didn’t just give herself the middle name arbitrarily. It turns out, her grandmother married a man named Shakespeare many years ago and it was her mother’s maiden name.
Her mother didn’t include it in either her or her sister’s name, but given her affinity for the playwright, it’s easy to see why she made the switch. And these days, Shakespeare makes a lot more sense than Pauline.
As a young actress, Thurber fell in love with Shakespeare. She knew very quickly as a student at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco that she didn’t connect with contemporary plays. Then when Thurber attended the Berkley Shakespeare Festival she had an instant connection.
“I love the size of the work and I love the scope of it,” Thurber said. “I love the stories behind it, whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. It’s hard to find plays that are as good as Shakespeare.”
She played characters like Beatrice in “Much Ado About Nothing,” Portia in “Merchant of Venice” and Lady Anne in “Richard III,” and was hooked. She joined the National Shakespeare Company and traveled around the country performing.
But one day, Thurber realized she just wasn’t making it in the profession.
“I was getting to 40 and didn’t have an acting career,” she said.
So she went back to school and got her masters in theater education at Emerson College in Boston and embarked on a teaching career that even Thurber didn’t see coming. She created Project Shakespeare for her thesis project at Emerson, and thought her education would lead to a job at a high school, but that just never seemed to happen.
“Nowhere in my head was it going to be a 25-year thing,” Thurber said. “I never would have guessed it would be where it is right now back then, maybe not even 10 years ago.”
But not only has Thurber been leading Project Shakespeare for a quarter century, Jaffrey is her third stop. It began in Boston and then went with her to Nashua before moving to Jaffrey in 2006. Not only did she learn that Jaffrey is a great place to live, but it did wonders for the program.
Her directorial debut was with “Taming of the Shrew” and every year since, Thurber has made it a point to learn a new Shakespeare play – with “Pericles” this year and “King Lear” up next. Now she is teaching and directing year-round thanks to the growth of Project Shakespeare.
“I found out I was a better director than I was an actor,” she said. “And I can’t direct it if I don’t know it.”
Just this year alone, Project Shakespeare has put on eight shows, but not all are works of the Bard. There are other plays out there that the students she works with like to perform, and things have expanded so much that Thurber couldn’t possibly do strictly Shakespeare. She now does one-week vacation intensive shows, collaborates with Franklin Pierce University, teaches homeschool classes and brings groups during the summers to England to perform and learn at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
“It’s never been as successful as when I came here,” she said. “And that’s good, because where I go, it goes.”
This will be the 10th year of “A Christmas Carol,” which will be performed in Peterborough, Greenfield, Rindge, Hancock – and of course, Jaffrey – along with Fitzwilliam and Harrisville. She loves bringing the students to local performance spaces because, she feels, the community gets a lot out of it too.
“I’d like to think I’m educating the community as much as I am educating the children,” Thurber said.
Thurber typically works with an age range of 5 to 18 years old. She knows that young actors can only take so much, so she will cut down her plays to just over an hour, because it’s quality over quantity.
“You put the bar at a certain place and you make adjustments, but they’ll reach it,” Thurber said.
She puts everything she has into her work, and in turn expects to produce the best theater possible.
“I’m always doing Project Shakespeare,” Thurber said. “It consumes my life.”
Thurber envisions if she stayed in Boston, she’d likely still be teaching Shakespeare down there as well, but she truly believes she ended up in the right place.
“It’s more than a job. It’s who I am. It’s what I do,” she said. “I think everyone should love what they do.”