The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 27.056 Saturday, 20 February 2016
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: Saturday, February 20, 2016
Subject: Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2016-2017 Season
Free For All
THE TEMPEST
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Ethan McSweeny
We kick off the season with the beloved annual Washington tradition, Free For All, bringing back Ethan McSweeny’s spectacular production of The Tempest. In Shakespeare’s final play, the powerful magician Prospero, attended upon by his daughter, a magical sprite, and a villainous prisoner, leads a group of shipwrecked survivors from vengeance to reconciliation. Trickery and magic, romance and revenge set the stage for Shakespeare’s crowning masterpiece.
ROMEO AND JULIET
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Alan Paul
The most famous love story in the world and one of Shakespeare’s early poetic masterworks, Romeo and Juliet follows two star-crossed lovers from love at first sight to eternal life hereafter. Caught tragically between two feuding families, alike in dignity and in enmity, Shakespeare’s immortal young lovers try to fashion a new world amid the violence of the old, but cataclysmic choices and tragic twists propel them toward a final confrontation with fate.
THE SECRET GARDEN
By Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon
Based on the 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Directed by David Armstrong
A co-production with The 5th Avenue Theatre, in a future season, to be announced
When 10 year-old Mary Lennox loses her parents, she travels to England to stay with Archibald Craven, her morose uncle. Terrified of every nook and cranny of the haunted Craven Manor, Mary seeks refuge in her late aunt’s mysterious walled garden, where she discovers amazing secrets. The Tony® and Drama Desk Award-winning musical based on the beloved children’s book, The Secret Garden, is a story of hardship turned into hope, of beauty discovered in unlikely places, the power of the child’s imagination, and the wisdom that accompanies growing up.
Musicals at the Shakespeare Theatre Company are made possible by the Beech Street Foundation.
KING CHARLES III
By Mike Bartlett
Directed by David Muse
Produced in association with American Conservatory Theater and Seattle Repertory Theatre
The Queen is dead. After a lifetime of waiting, Prince Charles ascends the throne with Camilla by his side. As William, Kate, and Harry look on, Charles prepares for the future of power that lies before him… but how to rule? In the wake of sensational Broadway and West End runs, this regional theatre debut of King Charles III, written primarily in Shakespearean blank and rhymed verse, explores the people underneath the crowns, the unwritten rules of Britain’s democracy, and the conscience of its most famous family.
THE SELECT (THE SUN ALSO RISES)
An adaptation created by Elevator Repair Service
Based on the novel “The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
Directed by John Collins
The Select (The Sun Also Rises) was initially produced by Elevator Repair Service and New York Theatre Workshop.
A stage littered with liquor bottles and café chairs seamlessly transforms itself from the bistros of Paris to the banks of the Irati River; a long bar table roars to life and charges a champion matador; an out-of-control dance party takes off during a night of nonstop revelry. As the story winds its way through France and Spain and lands in Pamplona where bullfighting and the fiesta rage in the streets, Hemingway’s narrator carries the heavy burdens of a war injury and his inability to have the woman he loves—a woman whose amorous escapades he follows with bemused but painful fatalism.
The Select (The Sun Also Rises) is a co-production of Elevator Repair Service and New York Theatre Workshop. It was commissioned by the Ringling International Arts Festival, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL, in association with the Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY; the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival with funding from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative; ArtsEmerson: The World On Stage, Boston, MA; and Festival Theaterformen Hannover/Braunschweig.
MACBETH
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Liesl Tommy
“The Scottish Play,” Shakespeare’s exploration of murderous ambition, fiendish equivocation, and a love of terrifying intimacy. In a world beset by civil war and invasion, Macbeth and his scheming lady start a series of murders, plunging us into the darkest night of the soul. Storms rage, fires burn, and night blankets the earth in this tale of sound and fury, accompanied by Shakespeare’s richest poetry.
WOMEN BEWARE WOMEN
By Thomas Middleton
Directed by Michael Kahn
What if Romeo and Juliet had lived? Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean thriller, a characteristically spiky, sexy response to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, begins with a newly married couple, eloped from Venice, arriving in Florence. When horny young husband Leantio is forced to take a job, his equally passionate bride, Bianca, makes the mistake of listening to her mother-in-law and finds herself abducted and attacked by the Duke of Florence. Needless to say, the plot twists and turns, and murder and forbidden desires ensue.