Chicago Shakespeare Festival

March 30 – April 13, 2014

Adaptor/Director: Emma Rice

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Lauded all around the world for its trademark vitality, the artistic collective from Cornwall, England, Kneehigh makes its long-awaited Chicago debut with the iconic work that first catapulted the company to international fame. Marrying gorgeous music and ingenious staging with cheeky humor and Wagnerian intensity, Kneehigh now reimagines one of the world’s oldest love stories. Cornish King Mark is at war; he rules with his head, not his heart. But he hasn’t counted on falling head over heels for his enemy’s sister, or expected the arrival of the enigmatic Tristan.

Chicago Shakespeare Festival

April 29 – June 15, 2014

Director: Christopher Luscombe

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“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” In a rousing finale to the 2014 season, Shakespeare’s powerful history play takes center stage in our magnificent Courtyard Theater for the very first time. Acclaimed British director Christopher Luscombe, whose work has been featured at the Royal Shakespeare Company, sheds new light on the Bard’s legendary coming-of-age story. Against all odds, a charismatic young monarch confronted by the ferocity of war proves his worth as a man—and king. Henry V is Shakespeare’s rallying cry, celebrating the power of language to summon battlefields from thin air and ignite our souls to action.

THE KILLER – Theater For A New Audience, Brooklyn, NC
By Eugène Ionesco
Newly Translated: Michael Feingold
Direction: Darko Tresnjak
Featuring Michael Shannon

May 17-June 29, 2014

A searing and darkly funny parable about violence and resistance, Ionesco’s The Killer premiered in Paris in 1959 and has become a modern classic of the Theatre of the Absurd. Berenger, Ionesco’s cheerful, well-meaning everyman, discovers a “radiant city” near his dismal urban home, a perpetually sunny, impeccably clean place full of marvelous architecture and delicious food. The one hitch: a serial murderer has been brazenly killing people there for so long that the authorities have given up trying to catch him.

Oscar nominee (Revolutionary Road) Michael Shannon plays Berenger. Our production will bring out the humor and taut film noir aura of this work, underscoring the cinematic allure of the murders, the futile chase, the bungled investigation and the climactic confrontation with the criminal. The exquisitely simple approach will spotlight powerful, precise acting and spare, sculptural design.

Shakespeare In The Park

June 3 – July 6, 2014

Directed by Jack O’Brien
Lily Rabe as Beatrice
Hamish Linklater as Benedick
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Hamish Linklater and Tony® nominee Lily Rabe return to the Park this summer as the wise-cracking, would-be lovers Beatrice and Benedick in the beloved romantic comedy MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Central Park becomes sun-drenched Sicily at the turn of the last century, where the heat of summer ignites the fevered passions of lovesick ladies in corsets and pining gentlemen spying from the verandah. Three-time Tony winner Jack O’Brien directs this delightful skirmish of wit between two self-declared bachelors tricked by their mischief-making friends into falling in love against their will and in spite of their own hearts.

Shakespeare In The Park

July 22 – August 17, 2014

Directed by Daniel Sullivan
John Lithgow as Lear

Revenge, rage, grief and delusion thunder upon the Delacorte as Tony® and Emmy® Award winner John Lithgow takes the stage as one of theater’s great tragic heroes, KING LEAR. Tony winner Daniel Sullivan directs Shakespeare’s classic drama about a King who loses everything—including his mind—when he disowns his favorite daughter, and finds himself betrayed in return.