On this stage, all the players are mere children

Shakespeare, thou wouldst not have believed thine eyes.

You’d be 445 years old this month, according to a recent production of “The Tempest” in Atlanta. Not exactly the target demo for kids only a few years older than Twitter. And yet there 50 current and former Garden Hills Elementary School students were, reveling in the exotic language and scenarios of your comical tale about a shipwreck’s scheming survivors.

Reveling as audience members?

Surely you jest.

“I’m part of the boat that splits at the beginning and starts everything off,” fifth-grader Erica Evans said. “We kind of figured it out as we went along.”

Just like that, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Which it is at Garden Hills.

For 15 years, the handsome old brick school tucked away in a sylvan patch of Buckhead has “done the Bard.” Usually, the Annual Shakespeare Project is limited to third- through fifth-graders, who rehearse under the guidance of Georgia Shakespeare Festival pros.

Three months of work culminates in a performance in full costume and the original language, albeit adapted slightly (this “Tempest” ran 10 scenes, for instance, and fifth-grader Rachel Bittner starred as deposed duchess Prospera, instead of the original’s duke Prospero).

Forsooth, Shakespeare, thou ain’t seen nothing yet.

To celebrate this year’s milestone production, participation was opened to all grades, and included seven kindergartners. For every potential hurdle —- “It’s quite an undertaking keeping the attention of k through second-graders,” said Marie Andujar, the project’s longtime parent coordinator —- there were unanticipated side benefits.

“They’re so small, when they have to hold up the hems of the goddesses’ dresses, they’re the right height,” Erica observed sagely.

At the other end of the spectrum, alumni of the program were invited back to take part in the 15th anniversary production, where the packed audience on a recent Friday night included many adults who’d chosen “The Tempest” over Ye Olde March Madness on TV. After joining in the opening shipwreck scene, the alums returned to the audience, where they took turns reciting pithy facts about “The Tempest” and its creator (including his advanced age).

“It’s kind of a ‘Pop-Up Video’ version of Shakespeare,” quipped Georgia Shakespeare’s Joshua Waterstone, the show’s adapter and director.

For all 10 returnees, parting truly had been such sweet sorrow. An hour before curtain, Khushboo Farjana was putting the finishing touches on a Shakespeare poster for the stage. All around her, younger students dressed as mariners, goddesses, a servant spirit and a tipsy butler chattered excitedly or rehearsed their lines. For two years, Khushboo had been in their shoes, and she hadn’t had to think twice about coming back to the place where she’d played the widow in “The Taming of the Shrew.”

“I miss the old days,” the Sutton Middle School sixth-grader sighed.

Alison Hopkins, 13, spent most of Friday morning at Garden Hills watching her sister, Sarah, play Trinculo the jester in a run-through of the show, then she came back to help out in the evening. A Sutton seventh-grader, she’d acted Shakespeare for five years at Garden Hills, starting out as a tree in “Macbeth” back in first grade.

Now she smiled as fourth-grader Madison McBride, aka Antonia, duchess of Milan, glided regally by in the same bottlefly green gown she’d worn as that tree so very long ago.

“It’s deja vu,” Alison said. “I told her it was good luck.”

Or as thou once put it, Shakespeare, all’s well that ends well.

Milestones covers significant events and times in the lives of metro Atlantans. Big or small, hugely celebrated or known only to a few —- tell us of a milestone we should write about at: jvejnoska@ajc.com or mail it to Milestones, c/o Jill Vejnoska, 72 Marietta St. N.W., Atlanta, GA 30303. Please include your phone number and/or e-mail address.