ACTS OF PEACE: Barry runs a summer theater festival in France that promotes international understanding. Glenn Matsumura

AMID THE TURMOIL of campus protests against the Vietnam War, Miranda Barry left for a quarter abroad at the Stanford program in France. Her weeks in Tours cultivated an appreciation for international experiences as a means for furthering peace and community. Nearly 15 years later, while working as a producer for PBS, she returned to France on business and found that her ear for the language and her love for the Loire Valley had endured. Barry bought a house in Pontlevoy, across from its immense abbey. A relic from 1034, the abbey now houses an international study center.

“I’ve lived in theater and film for all of my life,” Barry says, “and I know that there’s nothing like it to get people to look beyond their own personal concerns and just throw themselves into a common activity that’s incredibly compelling and difficult and fun.” So when a neighbor in France proposed that Barry do some theater with the village’s international community of children, she created the Val de Loire Youth Theatre Festival/ Festival du Jeune Theatre.

Within the abbey’s arch-lined courtyard and linden tree groves, Barry produced a bilingual performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The festival’s 37 participants came from the United States, England, Belgium and France and ranged in age from 9 to 23. In performance, the mortal characters spoke English and the fairies French, but while rehearsing the young actors took language classes and practiced acting in their nonnative language. (The Welsh actor who played Bottom performed in French during those scenes when his character is bewitched.)

For the second festival this summer, she plans one two-week session for 9- to 14-year-old participants and a monthlong one for youths 14 to 20. Their productions will be Fables de la Fontaine and Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine.

Barry emphasizes that her main goal for the project is peace and understanding. “It’s about bringing young people from around the world to work and live together for a specific period of time. Living with people your own age for a month is something different; it gives people a chance to really know each other,” she says. “Ten or 15 years from now these young people are going to find themselves in a foreign country or in a conversation with someone who comes from a different culture, and they will realize that they have the understanding of how to listen and how to learn from somebody who comes from a different place.”