It’s one of those simmering spring days that presages a humid summer, and O’Kane Hall’s 132-year-old basement theater, The Pit, is nearly unbearable.
But Katherine Lu Hsu, associate professor of classics, appears immune to the wilting heat, as she subs for absent actors at a rehearsal of “Hamlet,” delivering lines with gusto and full-tilt physicality. This production, featuring Holy Cross students and English language learners who live in Worcester, is the fulfillment of Hsu’s deep desire to live a life of scholarship and contemplative action.
Community English with Drama is one of the College’s many community-based learning (CBL) courses that place faculty and students in collaborations with city residents or organizations. Hsu co-teaches the course with Martha Douglas-Osmundson, a Rhode Island-based educator and playwright, and in partnership with Katelyn Duncan, New Americans Librarian at the Worcester Public Library. In the course, Holy Cross students study Greek drama and Shakespeare, learning how drama assists English language learners in language acquisition. The English language learners' education is more nuanced still: They acquire not only language, but the cultural capital familiarity with Shakespeare confers.
“My expertise is in ancient Greek language and literature,” Hsu says. “It’s wonderful literature that is valuable for everyone because it asks the big questions about the human experience that go back thousands of years. One way I think we can work with literature and drama is through performance.
“And bringing together Holy Cross students with people who are learning English here in Worcester is something I find really exciting,” Hsu says.
At first blush, teaching Shakespeare to English language learners might seem ambitious. But scholarship — and experience — suggest otherwise.
"There's no way it should work,” Douglas-Osmundson says, “but it does, and it's incredible, and it's due to the commitment folks have made."
And native English speakers don't have a built-in advantage when it comes to the Bard, she says. "It's still 'Hamlet' at the end of the day."
Douglas-Osmundson has the experience to back up her argument. For years, she ran Shakespeare in the City, a Providence, Rhode Island-based initiative in which public and private schools in the city worked together to produce Shakespeare's plays. Shakespeare in the City’s cast members' ages ranged from 7 to 18 and included students with disabilities.
"I've done this with kids who couldn't talk," Douglas-Osmundson says. "Once you get Shakespeare in your body, though, you can do anything."
Ella Woei ’26, a neuroscience major with a minor in rhetoric and composition, plays Claudius, king of Denmark, Hamlet’s principal adversary: “We spent time looking at Greek tragedies to see how they relate to Shakespeare in ‘Hamlet,’ and also how we can apply them to our life now, which is really cool.”
Sophia Mariani ’26 was so moved by her experience in Community English with Drama that she wrote a front-page reflection for the April 2026 edition of the College’s student newspaper, The Spire.
“This course has been nothing like any other class that I have taken,” Mariani wrote. “We have truly built a special bond in this course.”
That a single course might meet the education goals of a culturally diverse mix of students, introducing them to ancient Greek drama, English Renaissance theater, and contemporary issues of assimilation and acculturation while building an acting company and staging a production in 14 weeks, well, that’s quite the scholastic hat trick.
“Watching the Holy Cross students work together with our community students has been a real joy,” Hsu says. “What we’re offering is unusual, and it’s a little difficult to explain. One of my areas of teaching and research focus is immigration, and to study and research immigration means I have an ethical obligation to connect with our local immigrant community.”
The goals and objectives around Community English with Drama are multidisciplinary and iterative, public and personal, ancient and contemporary and accessible, Hsu says.
“The thing that’s been most exciting about this class has been to see the formation of a community where there wasn’t community before,” Hsu says. “What I hope Holy Cross students get from this experience is an understanding that co-creation with people who come from a different place or have different life experiences produces a rich kind of knowledge that they couldn’t get otherwise.
“Performance requires collaboration, dependence on one another and trust in one another,” Hsu says. “I have been thrilled to see how the formation of a joint acting company has fostered meaningful relationships among people from different countries with different ages, native languages, class status, and education levels.”
"My hope is we'll have students who want to do this again, who tell a friend, 'I had this really awesome experience, and you should try it,'" Duncan says.
Tzu-ting is a local English language learner in the course. She plays Ophelia. Tzu-ting came to the United States from Taiwan in 2025. She says Community English with Drama is helping her assimilate beyond language acquisition: “I have conversation with my classmates, and I do not have this last year. I always feel lonely because I have no friends and family here.”
Not anymore.
“I feel I have so many friends with me and learning English together,” Tzu-ting says. “It is a very good class.”
“One of the things that really appeals to me about the mission of Holy Cross is this question of how do we find meaning in life and in history,” Hsu says. “When we study the past, it gives us an opportunity to understand others’ experiences, to connect with what is the same, but also to identify with what is unique about each context, each time, each place.
“I’m interested in what studying ancient literature can do for us,” Hsu says. “I think studying the past orients us in the present and helps us imagine new futures.”
