GRAND FORKS — The North Dakota Shakespeare Festival, which began as a project at UND eight years ago and has since taken a life of its own, is bringing “The Merchant of Venice” to Grand Forks this June.

Artistic associate Veronica Lee Folkedahl, an East Grand Forks native in her second year with the festival, is excited to be bringing this performance to town.

“I think this is one of the lesser-known titles that we’ve brought to Grand Forks,” Folkedahl said. “It’ll be really exciting for our Grand Forks audience to get to experience a different side of Shakespeare that they’re maybe less exposed to.”

The North Dakota Shakespeare Festival will perform “The Merchant of Venice” in a co-production with the South Dakota Shakespeare Festival June 12-16 at Town Square in downtown Grand Forks. The two companies are pooling their resources for a performance that will cost twice as much as NDSF’s budget, which is just over $25,000, according to Murry.

Admission is free, which director and founder of the festival Stephanie Faatz Murry said is a product of the festival’s mission statement. According to

the festival’s website

, the festival’s mission is “to bring professional theater to the community regardless of economic status, fostered by the belief that access to the arts is a human right.”

This season’s performance, “The Merchant of Venice,” is a play Murry said is often recognized by its name but not well known for its content.

The play, notorious for its antisemitism best represented by its character Shylock, a caricature of a Jewish moneylender who demands of the play’s Christian protagonist a pound of flesh to amend a debt, was chosen before the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel last year. The initial choice was made because neither of the Shakespeare companies had performed the play before.

Following the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the company decided to continue with the play, opting instead to make a point about the presence of antisemitism.

“This is a very important story to tell, specifically with the views on antisemitism that we see throughout the show,” actor Logan Kehoe said. “I think we’ve all been able to navigate that with the right amount of respect to the topic as we do.”

For Kehoe, who plays the Duke of Arragon, this will be his first year participating in the festival, though from the South Dakota side. Originally from Humboldt, Iowa, Kehoe recently graduated from the University of South Dakota with a degree in musical theater.

Abby Anderson, who will appear in the play as Portia, one of its central characters, said an exciting part of the production will be the live music, which will include a guitar, a mandolin and an accordion.

Originally from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Anderson recently graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi with a Master of Fine Arts in acting. This season will be her second with the North Dakota Shakespeare Festival.

“It’s not just once or twice throughout the entire piece, it’s really integrated within our story as well,” Anderson said. “Which is something that I think is really exciting.”

According to Murry, the music will integrate not just with the scenes, but the characters as well. Because the story is set in Venice, Venetian music will feature heavily, but depending on the background of the characters on stage, it will also include music from Moroccan, Spanish and Jewish cultures.

Murry said the festival receives roughly 85% of its funding in the form of grants from the Myra Foundation, the Greater Grand Forks Convention and Visitors Bureau and the city of Grand Forks Arts Re-Grant program, which awards funds to nonprofit organizations that create arts and cultural opportunities in the city. The festival is also supported in part by a grant from the Iseminger Endowment Fund for the Arts, a community foundation that awards funding for the arts in the Grand Forks region.

The rest of the festival’s funding comes from individual donors and fundraising events, Murry said. In the past, individual donors have contributed anywhere from $5 to $3,000.

“We’ve been very fortunate that the community seems to believe in what we’re doing enough to help us continue it,” Murry said.

Murry founded the festival while an assistant professor of movement and musical theater at UND in 2017 after receiving a grant through the university’s Fine Arts and Humanities Scholarship Initiative, which awarded her $25,000 to kick off the festival’s first season.

Murry said she left UND in 2017, and beginning in 2020, the festival became fiscally sponsored by the Community Foundation of Grand Forks, East Grand Forks and Region.

Still, the festival maintains close connections with UND. According to Murry, apart from her own ties, the festival’s production manager is UND’s technical director, and one of the festival’s board members is a scene and lighting design faculty member at UND. One of the actors, Tyler Herbert, who will be playing Gratiano this year, recently graduated from UND with a degree in musical theater.

Murry said the company has gone through a number of changes since its inception. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with a budget of $9,000 and a company of five, the festival held a drive-in performance of Hamlet in the parking lot of a Cabela’s.

“It was a very North Dakota, Minnesota experience,” Murry said. “Just drive into the Cabela’s and see some Shakespeare.”

According to Murry, this is the first season that the budget size for the festival has been at pre-pandemic levels.