For 15 years, two or three or sometimes even four times a year, during and after school, I did real theater with students between the ages of 10 and 18. In their words and mine, this is our story. How we learned, together, to make ourselves into a theater troupe. How we created the bonds of trust that made everything possible. How we made Shakespeare's words come alive. How we sustained each other with processing circles and trust-building games. How we learned to believe in each other and ourselves, and looking back, what it meant to us in the end....This is a book about transformation, about how words written 400 years ago changed my life and the lives of my students.