Shakespeare

In 2024, the Island Shakespeare Festival in Whidbey Island, Washington, set a goal of producing “zero-waste.” They partnered with local sustainability organizations to confront their waste issue and transform the front-of-house experience for theatregoers.

In Keiko Green’s The Bed Trick, a new adaptation of All’s Well That Ends Well, issues of consent in both the bedroom and the theatre classroom are explored in the modern context of college. Erin Murray explains how the show creates a theatrically slippery and inquisitive space which prompts audience members to examine their own role in a society that fosters rape culture. 

Educator Rainier Pearl-Styles recounts their experience of devising a show in response to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, using tenets of Paolo Freire’s theory of liberatory education. Through recasting, restorying, and restructuring, the participants were able to use Shakespeare as a tool for understanding power and identity.  

Sophie McIntosh recounts her experience seeing Double Feature’s productions of Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in one Brooklyn brownstone. The directors of the two shows prioritized care and collectivity and aimed to throw away power structures, despite their limited resources. As a person who has historically felt alienated by Shakespeare, Double Feature helped Sophie discover that Shakespeare was allowed to be for her too. 

Monica Payne recaps the 26th international Gdansk Shakespeare Festival, where artists from around the globe adapted, deconstructed, and celebrated Shakespeare’s plays through boldly contemporary productions.

Robert Hubbard discusses the South Dakota Shakespeare Festival production of Othello, which Tara Moses adapted and directed through an Indigenous Futurist lens. The resulting production employed its Shakespearean source text to model solidarity between Tribal Sovereignty and Black Liberation movements.

Robert Hubbard sits down with Dr. Nicolette Bethel and Philip A. Burrows to discuss their creation of the annual Shakespeare in Paradise Festival in the Bahamas.

Carla Della Gatta offers strategies and considerations for theatremakers who are looking to create bilingual or semi-bilingual renditions of the canonized classics.

Madeline Sayet argues that promoting Shakespeare as the best writer of all time is a dangerous and white supremacist viewpoint, and she believes it’s time to interrogate the Bard’s placecent as the pinnacle of theatrical achievement.

Holly Derr interviews Lavina Jadhwani about the document she created called Dismantling Anti-Black Linguistic Racism in Theatre, which offers several examples of potentially anti-Black language, such as Ethiopian, master, and minstrel; their use in Shakespeare; why they might be problematic; and possible substitutions.

In this last installment of the Beyond the Western Canon series, Sadie Berlin questions how marginalized voices are represented on stage and calls for more experimental work by artists of color on Canadian stages.

Loren Noveck discusses the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate the entire corpus of Shakespeare into contemporary modern English.

Professor Christin Essin talks about problematic staging of gendered violence at a production she recently brought her students to and the importance of content warnings and taking care of survivors in theatrical works.

Robert Hubbard discussions Madeline Sayet’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the South Dakota Theatre Festival.

Charlene V. Smith talks about asking hard questions around the interpretation of early modern English classics, Brave Spirits Theatre’s production of The Changeling, and five tips for dealing with sexual assault in art responsibly.

Emer McHugh and Jess R. Pfeffer discuss Hamlet’s nunnery scene, how gendered violence onstage is often about the perpetrator’s character development, problematic assaults on TV, and more.