To Be or Not to Be: Nothing Stops These Actors

Actress Samantha Joy Pearlman, left
encourages Armanda Long

PHILADELPHIA — Shakespeare chose simple words for the most complicated of questions, words so powerful that they have resonated for four centuries.
When Heather Krause, a teaching artist with Walnut Street Theatre, saw how her students responded to those words, she had an outrageous idea: stage Hamlet with six high school-age actors with mental retardation and cerebral palsy, children so disabled that all are in wheelchairs and some cannot speak without the aid of machines.