Public health takes the stage

“All the world’s a stage.”

Originally penned by William Shakespeare in the play “As You Like It,” the sentiment extends to a surprising group: students at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health.

Yet, the play was the thing during the 2025 Quakespeare in the Park event as 300 students from two undergraduate public health courses researched, wrote, directed and performed one-act plays. The 10-minute theatrical presentations communicated key health messages gleaned from public health case studies.

The interdisciplinary project, which was made possible through a 2024 grant from Texas A&M Health, engaged students taking PHLT 305 Epidemiology in Public Health and PHLT 415 Emergency Management in Public Health courses. This unique approach helped them consider public health from a different angle and learn to communicate complicated information to educate society, said Mahmoud Shaltout, PhD, who teaches the PHLT 305 course.

“Roleplaying in science education is an innovative example of active learning that fosters participation, communication, creativity and empathy,” Shaltout said. “These are all important and useful skills in public health, especially when investigating epidemic outbreaks or responding to a disaster.”

The playful twist on Shakespeare’s name hints at the project’s purpose.

“We were trying to build off the concept of public health emergencies from both our public health emergency and epidemiology courses,” said Angela Clendenin, PhD, who teaches PHLT 415. “We also planned to use the school’s green space to perform outside, so we settled on ‘Quakespeare in the Park’ because it was about public health emergencies and disasters and it’s a play.”

The Quakespeare project, which was first introduced into the courses’ curriculum during the 2024 academic year, is not only proving popular but also sustainable. Shaltout and Clendenin invited Texas A&M College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts (PVFA) faculty to work with the students to learn how to put on a production, including identifying, creating and investing in props. Now, those props are in storage waiting to be tapped in future student productions. That type of wise investment also means that Quakespeare can continue to be offered as an innovative way to teach students about storytelling.

Setting the stage

In the project, students are assigned into small groups and given a specific public health case study. The case studies used in 2025 focused on the 1988 mass salmonella poisoning in Oregon, the 1995 Chicago heat wave, the 1999 West Nile virus outbreak in New Yorkand the 2022 polio outbreak in New York.

The Aggies were pushed from the start to begin to think differently about how to communicate in the assignment.

“Initially, we were thinking, ‘We’re acting in a play in an epidemiology class? Are you serious?’” said Colin Sims ’26, a two-time Quakespeare participant, about his first experience in 2024. “But by the end, we acted our hearts out. We loved the project idea because it was so fun.”

The first step involved learning more about the case study.

“There has to be a script, but to make that script, we had to do research to make sure it was accurate and reflected what was going on,” Sims said.

The project’s next phase brought students into unfamiliar territory: beginning to develop their one-act play. Fortunately, students received guidance from PVFA faculty members throughout the process.

“Their advice was really crucial to the project,” Sims said. “These professors helped us learn that even the smallest details matter.”

The student groups soon began having moments of inspiration that started bringing their assigned case study to life.

“Our case study in 2024 was the SARS outbreak, so we decided to do a spin-off love story based on the 2012 book and 2014 movie  ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ but we called ours ‘The Fault in Our SARS,’ Sims said. “ It was a fun little spin-off with a love story based in a hospital that was basically breaking every health care professional rule. The patient falls in love with a doctor and they have interpersonal contact, but it was a very funny play.”

With the PVFA faculty’s support, students continued to go deeper in exploring the various components and nuances of performing arts, including scriptwriting, scene structure, character development and even costumes.

“We use costumes to dive into the life for each character to help tell their story,” said Grace Adinku, PhD, a PVFA senior lecturer. “We create the costumes based on the plot and the character and their appearance. The choice of costume helps to visually explain the time of day, place, year, era and the character’s psychological state of the mind and age.”

The competition

As final performance neared, groups were challenged to embody Shakespeare’s words from “The Twelfth Night”: “Be not afraid of greatness: Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

The groups in each section performed their one-act play for the class, who then voted on the section’s top group in an “American Idol” type of selection process. Each section’s top group then moved onto the six-team final.

After watching the six finalists’ performances, a panel of judges awarded the top prize to the team Too Hot to Handle, from the PHLT 305 course Epidemiology in Public Health. The play created by Kenzie Almaraz ’26, Kirby Crow ’27, Bianca Gonzalez ’26, Leilani Leon-Guerrero ‘26, Mylee Nottingham ’26, Sarah Olmos ’26, Zoie Partlow ’26, Gentry Rogers ’26 and Marc Zapata ’27 focused on the Chicago Heat Wave of 1995, which killed more than 700 people.

Their script included three primary characters: a mother who was a health care nurse, her young daughter and a grandmother who refused to take the heat wave seriously. The Too Hot to Handle team’s script addressed many of the case’s most pressing issues, including the challenge of effectively warning the general public, the use of public cooling stations, the stress placed on the area’s medical facilities, and the heightened risk of heat stroke and death in the elderly.

Even though there was only one Quakespeare winner, every team came away with significant insights.

“This whole project was probably the most effective and weird project that I’ve ever done in my undergraduate program,” said Sims, whose 2025 Quakespeare group performed in the finals with a one-act play incorporating the Harry Potter franchise in addressing the salmonella poisoning case study. “But when it came to real-world lessons, it was the best thing you could ever do because it’s got a lot of public health applications to it as well as the most effective and entertaining presentations that interested students and helped them learn something.”