Behind the Scenes at the Armory, an Immersion Course in History

By JAMES BARRON

The assignment was to make an eight-minute video “collage” that explained “King Lear” using images of modern celebrities. Whom to cast as Lear?

“We needed to think of someone who is very powerful, but also crazy,” said Paola Ocampo, 16, one of 26 teenagers in a summer program at the Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side. “We thought of Donald J. Trump.”

They leafed through a stack of magazines until they found a photograph of Mr. Trump that looked as if he was expressing a darker purpose. That was at odds with the glee in their voices as they clipped it.

There was more glee as they scanned it on a computer. And there was still more as they anticipated a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “King Lear” that will be staged at the armory in the fall by filling the cast in their video with photographs of Lady Gaga as Goneril, Natalie Portman as Cordelia and Morgan Freeman as the Earl of Glou cester.

So it goes in the reception rooms at the armory, with high-ceilinged spaces designed by Gilded Age geniuses like Louis Comfort Tiffany and Stanford White. The soldiers who once marched there have been replaced by officials from a nonprofit arts organization - and by the Armory Youth Corps, which gives high-school students a taste of what goes on behind the scenes.

They do a variety of jobs, sometimes working as greeters and ushers at the armory. Other times plunging into what amounts to a hands-on course in history - the armory's rich history. They are helping to digitize the thousands of photographs the military left behind when it leased the building to the Park Avenue Armory Conservancy.

“When we got here, every single locker we opened had treasures inside,” Rebecca Robertson, the conservancy's president. “We found three Lincoln letters and magazines from when the Queen Mother came here.” She explained that one of the letters from Lincoln was lying under a Life magazine with an article about the Queen Mother's visit to the United States in 1954 - and the ball that the Seventh Regiment gave in her honor at the armory.

If an army travels on its stomach, the Seventh Regiment ate very well long before that. Ms. Robertson said that when the Seventh Regiment became the first volunteer militia to answer Lincoln's call for troops at the beginning of the Civil War, “Delmonico's went with them.” Delmonico's was the restaurant that had defined fine dining in New York in the 1820s.

As for the photographs, the youth corps has digitized dozens this summer. Kirsten Reoch, the armory's historian, said youth corps members like Tim Vincent, 16, have learned about the Seventh Regiment as they went along, identifying the soldiers in the photographs they scanned.

He was holding a photograph of Colonel Daniel Appleton, who led the Seventh Regiment for 27 years, from 1889 to 191 6 - and who was photographed in a tent alongside a statue of Caesar Augustus.

What did he learn about Colonel Appleton from the photograph, which he said was taken in the 1880s? “I would say he was insecure,” Tim said, “because he had to have a statue and he had to have his men take it with them and put it in his tent when they went on maneuvers.” (Ms. Reoch said the photo had been taken at a camp near Peekskill, N.Y. “Summer camp for adults,” she said.)

Another youth corps member, Sobiha Ahmed, 18, from Canarsie, Brooklyn, measured the photo as Tim and Ms. Reoch told stories about Colonel Appleton: He had taken over from the Seventh Regiment's first commander, Col. Emmons Clark. Colonel Appleton has the largest portrait of anyone in the armory, a huge painting by one of the wide staircases. He changed the look of the armory before World War I. His family controlled the publishing house that put Henry James and Edith Wharton before the public.

A cross the hall was the “Lear” project, which Ms. Robertson described as “figuring out how to make ‘Lear' relatable” to teenagers.

“Lady Gaga looks really evil,” Paola said, sounding pleased.

She will see how evil the Royal Shakespeare Company's Goneril looks: She will go to London to watch rehearsals, as Jonathan Amaya did last year for “Macbeth.”

“That was my first Shakespeare,” said Mr. Amaya, 18, from East New York, Brooklyn. “I loved it.” He said he had learned about live theater from watching different performances there. “They'd change it up, and I'd see the stuff they'd cut out, and I understood it more,” he said.

But back to “Lear.” Paola said the group got the idea to cast Mr. Trump as Lear when “Cordelia gets banished.”

“We thought, ‘You're fired,'” she said.

So what did they make of the family dynamics of “King Lear”?

“I think they need some counseling,” she said.