Mosaic Theatre members do a read-through of The Tempest. Photo by Julie Edgar.

Staging Shakespeare is a challenge for the most serious of thespians, but somehow you know the teenagers of the Mosaic Youth Theatre in Detroit are going to nail it.  Quip by quip, observation by observation, the young actors showed their considerable chops during a lively, sometimes noisy, read-through on a recent night.

Their guest – Lear deBessonet (yes, Lear) – came in from New York for a day to offer her interpretation of a musical adaptation of “The Tempest,” which she crafted and directed for the PUBLIC WORKS theatre, an arm of New York’s acclaimed Public Theater. A low-key presence in jeans and a ponytail, deBessonet, was there to get the actors thinking about how they will stage Shakespeare’s tragicomedy in May.

Mosaic was chosen as the first company outside of New York to stage the PUBLIC WORKS production.

“We were looking at the national landscape [of theatre companies] and we looked at Mosaic as a beacon of the values of art and community,’’ deBessonet said. PUBLIC WORKS mounts large-scale productions that mix professional and nonprofessional actors, making the audience not just spectators but creators. “The Tempest” at the Delacorte Theatre in New York City in 2013 featured a cast of 200, including a clutch of cab drivers.

Detroit’s production will feature 140 players, including a marching band and aerialists, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s Civic Youth Ensemble, and a few dance and drumming groups.

Mosaic has been “engaging the community that way for as long as we’ve known them,” said Dennis Scholl, vice president for arts of Knight Foundation, which focuses in part on audience engagement intiatives.  The company’s selection by one of the great theatre companies in the U.S. “confirms what we believe – Mosaic’s work is artistically excellent,” Scholl said.

Knight has supported Mosaic for years, most recently in 2013 when Mosaic won a $200,000 Knight Arts Challenge grant to integrate the arts into an elementary school curriculum. The project is ongoing.

After the 40-plus Mosaic singers went upstairs to rehearse, the 30 or so actors set up their chairs in a wide circle in the Black Box, the room where they rehearse and perform studio productions. deBessonet, joined by Mosaic’s director of acting programs, Courtney Burkett,  and Wayne State University choreographer Jill Dion, explained the influences behind the PUBLIC’s musical adaptation of “The Tempest,” most notably the Historical Pageantry Movement.

In 1916, a key figure in that movement put together a production in New York City with 1,500 people performing Shakespeare’s 400-year-old play about a duke stranded on a bewitched island, trying to bend its magic and its inhabitants to his will. The point was to make the stage a truly democratic place, where actors and non-actors shared a world, if only for a few moments, and where the audience could not have cared less who was who.

 “We are interested in tapping into the idealism of those folks,” deBesonnet told the group. “That’s the spirit of ensemble of Mosaic; you’re inviting outsiders in. You’re an ambassador of welcome.”

David Johnson, 16, one of three actors who shared the role of King Richard in “Richard III” last year in Mosaic’s Black Box, won the role of Caliban in “The Tempest.” He showed the group how he’ll lope around the stage like an animal – his take on Prospero’s would-be slave. They approved.

“I think a play this large, to take it on is so challenging. To hear the person who wrote and directed it opens up a lot of opportunities for actors to do it the right way – and to formulate our own ideas,” Johnson said.

Although it took PUBLIC WORKS a year and a half to put together “The Tempest” and about two months for the Mosaic to do it, Burkett, who is directing the play, said she is completely confident in her charges.

“We have the space and time to do the work,” she said. “They’re able to handle this as well as any group of professionals. We got this.”

Julie Edgar is a Detroit-based freelance writer.