All the world may be a stage, but these kids aren’t merely players.

There was acting, yes, but also the trying on of costumes, running amok in the theater, attending workshops and, at one point, drumming on the floor to illustrate Shakespearean meter.

It’s all part of the free ShakeXperience program, a new three-week “summer camp” at Gannon University that combined acting workshops with rehearsals of “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” The workshops end today, but the play continues through Saturday as part of Gannon’s Shakespeare Summer Nights festival.

And don’t worry, there are no men in tights here — the play’s been reimagined to take place in the 1950s, a suggestion from two of the students.

Organized by theater professors and Gannon graduates, ShakeXperience was conceived as a “page to stage” idea, looking at Shakespeare as a playwright, not as just a great wordsmith.

“I don’t mean to sound too noble, but it’s our passion,” Shawn Clerkin, Gannon theater director, said. “We’re committed to the notion of theater having the ability to change lives.”

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Their cupboards went bare then, but not this year.

Members of Assumption Greek Orthodox Church, masterminds behind the Greek Festival in Erie, are so committed to hospitality that when they ran out of food in 1989, the first year, they went home and made more.

After attendance at the first festival exceeded all expectations, “everybody had to go home and clean out their freezers and bake new pastries, ” said Tom Parthenakis, the co-grand chairman of the church’s 2007 festival, or panegyri.

Panegyri (“festival” in Greek; pronounced paw-nee-yee-ree), a summer tradition in Erie, draws people from around the region and from as far away as California. It starts today.

Assumption Greek Orthodox Church started the panegyri as a fundraiser for the building’s upkeep 19 years ago. It’s a small parish, with only 80 families. But somehow that’s all it takes to host a party that draws more than 30,000 people.

This year, they’re prepared.

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