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.

Royal Shakespeare Company

30 April – 2 October 2014

Directed by Polly Findlay

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When wealthy landowner Arden’s suspicions of his wife Alice cheating on him are confirmed, Arden, Alice and her lover find themselves playing a deadly game as a series of would be murderers set off in pursuit of Arden.

Polly Findlay makes her RSC debut to direct this anonymously written thriller.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theater

5 – 10 May (performed in Gujarati)

When Bharatram (Bertram) flees his native Gujarat for Bombay, his mother’s ward Heli (Helena), desperately in love, decides to pursue him. But Bharatram feels differently, and attaches two obstructive conditions to their marriage – conditions he is sure will never be met.

20th-century India stands in for Renaissance France in this joyful, imaginative production of a play that reverses all the usual expectations of Shakespearean comedy.

Antony and Cleopatra

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Jonathan Munby

TWO LOVERS ARE BLOWN APART BY LOVE AND WAR

Cleopatra, the alluring and fascinatingly ambiguous Queen of Egypt, has bewitched the great Mark Antony, soldier, campaigner and now one of the three rulers of the Roman Empire. When Antony quarrels with his fellow leaders and throws in his lot with Cleopatra, his infatuation threatens to split the Empire in two.

Roman virtue and Eastern vice, transcendent love and realpolitik combine in Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s greatest exploration of the conflicting claims of sex and power, all expressed in a tragic poetry of breathtaking beauty and magnificence.

The Shakespeare Theatre of NJ

Begins May 28

Directed by Bonnie J. Monte

Artistic Director Bonnie J. Monte directs The Tempest for the first time since 1991, her inaugural production at The Shakespeare Theatre. Prestigious company veteran Sherman Howard, an actor Ms. Monte describes as “a force of nature in himself,” will portray Prospero, the powerful magician who rules over his enchanted island home.

Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

Directed by Dominic Dromgoole

FRIENDS CLOSE, ENEMIES CLOSER

When Caesar returns to Rome from the wars a virtual dictator, Brutus and his republican friends resolve that his ambition must be curbed – which in Rome can mean only one thing: the great general must be assassinated. But once the deed is done, the idealistic conspirators must reckon with the forces of a new power bloc, led by Mark Antony and Caesar’s nephew Octavius. When their armies close at Philippi, will Caesar’s ghost be avenged?

Opposing dictatorship and republicanism, private virtue and mob violence, Shakespeare’s tense drama of high politics reveals the emotional currents that flow between men in power.

This production will employ Renaissance costumes and staging.