Calendar

Abrons Arts Center

February 4, 2014 – February 23, 2014

Directed by Charles McMahon

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Hailed as a “wild rumpus of a show” by The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pig Iron Theatre Company’s raucous, spirited Twelfth Night breathes new life into the Bard’s classic.
With equal measures of absurdity and heart, the company fuses their distinctive physical performance style with Shakespeare’s text, creating an exhilarating version replete with practical jokes, gender confusion, and mistaken identity. This exuberant, unpredictable, award-winning production is definitely not your grandparent’s Shakespeare.

Lantern Theater

February 6 – March 16, 2014

Directed by Charles McMahon

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Idealism, envy, and power politics collide as the Roman Republic reaches a crisis. Caesar’s political genius, military prowess, and overwhelming popular appeal make him the most powerful leader the Republic has ever known. But his popularity breeds suspicion among his rivals and some fear Caesar’s power will corrode the freedom of the State. Shakespeare’s vision of Rome is both epic and intimate, from powerful speeches in grand public squares to whispered conspiracies in back rooms and dark hallways. There in the shadows, unlikely alliances set up a chain of events that bring down the great Caesar and thrust Rome into a disastrous civil war. Tony Award nominee Forrest McClendon leads an all-Philadelphia cast in Shakespeare’s timeless political thriller, brought to you by “the city’s top presenter of Shakespeare’s work.” (TheaterMania.com)

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA 
By William Shakespeare 
Edited and Directed by Tarell Alvin McCraney 
February 18 – March 23, 2014 

In an exciting international collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company and GableStage, Miami, The Public welcomes back writer/director Tarell Alvin McCraney (The Brother/Sister Plays) as its new artist in residence with ANTONY & CLEOPATRA. At the fringes of a war-torn empire, a man and a woman have fallen desperately, passionately in love. But for a soldier set to enforce the imperial will and the queen of a people intent on throwing off the yoke of empire, there is no place for personal desire. McCraney creates a stripped down, radical new version of Shakespeare’s gripping story of romance set against a world of imperial politics and power play and transports us to 18th century, sun-soaked Saint-Domingue on the eve of revolution. RSC in America is presented in collaboration with The Ohio State University.

KING LEAR – Theater For A New Audience, Brooklyn, NY

By William Shakespeare
Direction: Arin Arbus
Featuring: Michael Pennington
Scenic Designer: Riccardo Hernandez
Costume Designer: Susan Hilferty
Lighting Designer: Marcus Doshi
Composer: Michael Attias

March 14 – May 4, 2014

Considered to be one of the greatest plays in the English language, King Lear tells the story of a savage familial power struggle that follows Lear’s misguided decision to apportion his kingdom before his death.

For Arin Arbus, the play’s taut intertwining of the political and the personal and its breathtaking power to distill an entire complex world into a story of two families is riveting. Moreover, she finds “its radical political assertions remarkable. Shakespeare challenges the very foundations of Western civilization, pointing out the absurdity of privilege, entitlement, social and economic hierarchies, and man’s assertion of his power over nature.”

This production is sponsored by Deloitte.

In the summer of 1974, the Brady and Partridge Families, recently canceled by ABC and no longer under America’s watchful eye, met in a blood-soaked, passion-filled, vengeance-fueled, very special episode of Shakespearean proportions.