Stage Voices

SIMON CALLOW ON ORSON WELLES

 

 

(Simon Callow's article appeared in the Times of London, 11/28.)

Orson Welles — a theatrical giant

Orson Welles knew how to make an entrance. Whatever the frustrations of later years, his directorial debut was a triumph

When you know a lot about someone, as I do about Orson Welles (having written two fat volumes of a biographical trilogy over the past 20 years), you rather dread fictional treatments of that person. So I approached the new film Me and Orson Welles very gingerly, especially since it is set in the Mercury Theatre in the 1930s. I was at drama school when the Welles virus first infected me: I read about the Mercury in Run-through, a book by John Houseman, a good portion of which is devoted to describing his relationship with Welles in the 1930s, culminating in a magnificent description of their work together, first for the Federal Theatre Project, then the Mercury Theatre. That’s the life for me, I thought: working 20 hours a day, under the charismatic leadership of a young genius — stretching oneself and the theatre to the very limits, defying convention, electrifying the audience, changing lives.

Houseman was describing a golden period in the theatre, and these are rare. Welles in his early twenties set off a series of brilliant theatrical fireworks that were unlike anything that had come before — were, indeed, unlike each other; each production had its own particular style, although iconoclasm was the rule. Of course, Welles went on to other glories. Made internationally famous — notorious, perhaps — by his radio version of The War of the Worlds, which panicked people thought was a report of an actual Martian invasion, he directed Citizen Kane, his first film, when he was 25, but then he fell out with the studio, and somehow nothing was ever the same again. His films were often taken away from him and re-edited, his radio career petered out, his theatre work imploded spectacularly with a musical version of Around the World in 80 Days that all but bankrupted him. In Europe he made extraordinary films such as Othello and Chimes at Midnight (known in some countries as Falstaff); none of them made any money. He acted in other people’s films to raise money for his own; he did commercials and chat shows in the hope that they would remind the industry that he was around. He did a huge amount of work, but few people saw it, especially not in America. What had started in such glory ended in a rather muted melancholy. Why this should be has been the subject of my books.

(Read more)

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article6933290.ece

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ALAN BENNETT ON AUDEN, BRITTEN, AND HIS NEW PLAY, 'THE HABIT OF ART'

 (The following article appeared in the November issues of The London Review of Books.)

Alan Bennett writes about his new play

By the time Auden came to live in the Brewhouse, a cottage in the grounds of Christ Church, in 1972 I had long since left Oxford and in any case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall some time in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from high table where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like the voice of the devil. Someone better informed put me right. It was Auden, at that time still with blondish hair and the face yet to go under the harrow.

I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have understood it if I had, but when Auden gave his inaugural lecture as professor of poetry the following year I dutifully went along, knowing, though not quite why, that he was some sort of celebrity. At that time I still harboured thoughts of becoming a Writer (and I thought of it in capital letters), so when Auden outlined what he took to be the prerequisites of a literary life, or at any rate a life devoted to poetry, I was properly dismayed. Besides favourite books, essential seemed to be a literary landscape (Leeds?), a knowledge of metre and scansion and (this was the clincher) a passion for the Icelandic sagas. If writing meant passing this kind of kit inspection, I’d better forget it. What Auden was saying (and he said it pretty regularly) was ‘All do as I do,’ which is what unhelpful writers often say when asked about their profession, though few with such seeming conviction and authority as the newly inaugurated professor of poetry.

He used to hold court in the Cadena, but it wasn’t a café I cared for. There were undergraduates I knew at whom Auden made passes, though I was still young and innocent enough to find a pass as remarkable as the person making it.

(Read more)

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/alan-bennett/alan-bennett-writes-about-his-new-play

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ORIGIN THEATRE COMPANY: TRANSLATING IRISH WORKS FOR THE AMERICAN STAGE

(Tanya Dean's article appeared in Irish Theatre Magazine, October 27.)

Reading between the headlines

New York's Origin Theatre Company has just produced Spinning the Timhttp://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=First+Irish+Festival&search_type=&aq=f# es, five new monologues by Irish women playwrights, as part of the 2009 First Irish Festival. Tanya Dean went along to the 59E59 Theatres, Off-Broadway, and talked to the writers about the commission.

“Five Irish women Playwrights, Five New York News Stories” read the tagline for Origin Theatre Company's Spinning the Times, with a New York Times quote –"Stunningly written monologues" – emblazoned on the promotional flier (although an observant eye will note that this quote actually referred to Origin's 2005 production of Mark O’Rowe’s Crestfall). As part of the 2009 1st Irish Festival, which ran over five weeks in twelve different New York venues, Origin Theatre Company ("Where European Theatre Lives") offered five Irish female playwrights a commission to write a short monologue based on a news story they found in the New York Times.

The festival's rubric of "Irish theatre" covers theatre exported by Irish companies, such as Fishamble's The Pride of Parnell Street, as well as theatre of Irish origin produced by American companies, such as Blood Guilty by The Bronx Company. So what does it mean to further sub-categorize work under the heading of Irish female playwright? (It seems to be a trend of late: witness the Abbey's ‘The Fairer Sex’ series, which commissioned six new twenty-minute plays by women writers for rehearsed readings in June of this year.)

Playwright Belinda McKeon admitted to some mixed feelings about the general heading of "women playwrights". “I have to be honest here and say that I didn't know (or perhaps, through selective hearing, didn't hear), when taking the commission on in the very first instance, that the five monologues were going to be presented as five monologues by female playwrights – it was only later that this element of the show sank in for me. I'm never that keen on this kind of categorising, and I have to admit… I've never become more comfortable with it, with the sense of having these plays thought about first and foremost as plays by women, or plays somehow with a female perspective.

(Read more)

http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Features/Current/Reading-between-the-headlines.aspx

Visit Origin Theatre online: http://origintheatre.org/

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DAVID HARE: TEN YEARS INTO THE MILLENNIUM—“THE DECADE OF LOOKING AWAY”; PLUS BEST BOOKS ON UNDERSTANDING THE FINANCIAL CRISIS FROM THE NATIONAL THEATRE

(David Hare’s article ran in the Guardian, October 17.)

It all started 96 hours after 9/11

'Over chicken noodle soup, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, began to yield to the dazzling temptation of deliberately pursuing the wrong suspect. Hey, said the Americans, Let's Look Away'

In theatres up and down the country, it used to be that anyone, whatever their job, was pulled magnetically towards the stage. All through the day they would find themselves venturing down into the auditorium. They would casually try to catch a glimpse of the actors, a glimpse of the action, because that was where their job was rooted. Today, 10 years into the new century, theatre workers, like the rest of us, sit staring at computer screens all day, and sometimes all night. Hardly surprising, then, that this has been the decade of Looking Away.

Visit us, please, from a previous century and you'll see us walking down the streets, wired cockleshells in ears, jabbering like lunatics in a Victorian asylum. It has long been understood in any line at any shopping till that the electronic will take precedence over the physical. The queue will wait while the sales assistant answers the phone. In any given situation, Absence always trumps Presence, presumably on the grounds that the unknown has more potential for excitement than the known. "Is he all there?" we used to ask of our neighbours' idiot children. Now we ask of everyone, "Is he there at all?"

Every period throws up its own favoured means of mass distraction, but you're going to have to pull every history book off the shelf to find a distraction quite as nothing-to-do-with-anything as the US invasion of Iraq. The decade's significant date of choice for most historians is taken to be 11 September 2001. An airborne suicide attack on the twin towers in New York killed 2,948 people of 91 different nationalities. But if I was going to choose the day when the destiny of the new century really took shape, then I'd opt for 96 hours later. On 15 September, George Bush assembled his cabinet in casual clothes at Camp David (Paul Wolfowitz came without invitation and wore a suit) and, over chicken noodle soup, fried chicken and mashed potatoes, began to yield to the dazzling temptation of deliberately pursuing the wrong suspect. Hey, said the Americans, Let's Look Away.

(Read more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/17/david-hare-decade-9-11

Plus, in conjunction with Hare’s new play ‘The Power of Yes,’ recommendations from the National Theatre on a wide range of books about the current financial crisis--from the perceptive to the shocking to the downright hilarious:

• The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson, ISBN 9780141035482 £9.99
• Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed by Paul Mason, ISBN 9781844673964 £7.99
• Fool's Gold by Gillian Tett, ISBN 9781408701676 £12.99
• The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What it Means by Vince Cable, ISBN 9781848870574 £14.99
• Who Runs Britain?: and Who's to Blame for the Economic Mess We're in, ISBN 9780340839447 £7.99
• The Crash of 2008 And What It Means, ISBN 9781586486990 £9.99
• Chasing Alpha by Philip Augar, ISBN 9781847920362 £20.00
• The Crunch: How Greed and Incompetence Sparked the Credit Crisis by Alex Brummer, ISBN 9781847940094 £7.99
• House of Cards by William D. Cohan, ISBN 9781846141959 £25.00
• And The Roof Caved In by David Faber, ISBN 9780470474235 £17.99
• The Credit Crunch by Graham Turner, ISBN 9780745328102 £14.99
• The Fall Of Northern Rock by Brian Walters, ISBN 9781905641802 £10.99
• Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World by Stephen Green, ISBN 9781846142369 £25.00 
• The Euro: The Politics of the New Global Currency 9780300127300 £25.00 
• Keynes: The Return Of The Master 9781846142581 £20.00

Visit the National Theatre Web site: http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

(David Hare’s work is included in Duo!: The Best Scenes for Two for the 21^st Century from Applause Theatre and Cinema Books.)

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BRECHT, GOGOL, FRISCH IN TRANSLATION: ALISTAIR BEATON'S GHOSTS AND A NEW 'CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE'

(Alistair Beaton's article appeared in the Guardian, September 30.)

Translating Bertolt Brecht and other house guests

When Alistair Beaton went to work on an English version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, he felt the great playwright breathing down his neck – and found his arguments as relevant as ever

When you translate a play, you enter into a very intense and complex relationship with the playwright. Sometimes you feel as if you have invited them into your home.

It's not always an agreeable experience. When I was translating The Government Inspector, I used to find Nikolai Gogol roaming the house at night, patently half-mad, yet somehow endearingly welcome. He made me laugh, mostly because he made me look beneath the surface of things and see the normal in the grotesque and the grotesque in the normal. Even when he started banging on about Russia's mission to save the world, his own terrifically close relationship with God and the parlous state of my soul, I just couldn't bring myself to evict him.

When it came to translating The Arsonists, I would often find Max Frisch fussing around in the kitchen, tidying everything up and explaining in calm and reasoned tones (as he folded away the tea towels) why we have a moral duty to oppose evil. I agreed with almost everything he said, and I liked how he said it, but he did occasionally irritate me. I think it was probably something to do with the certainty and the precision of his moral clarity. He in turn accused me, of course, of merely being prejudiced against the Swiss.

(Read more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/sep/30/translating-bertolt-brecht

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TONY KUSHNER ON BRECHT'S 'MOTHER COURAGE'

(Kushner's article appeared in The Guardian, September 8.) 

Tony Kushner: Mother Courage is not just an anti-war play

It is the mother of all roles – and arguments still rage over its true meaning, but Mother Courage is Brecht's greatest work

Mother Courage and Her Children an anti-war play? It's certainly not a wildly enthusiastic endorsement of war, not a pro-war play. Brecht had been an ambulance driver during the first world war, an experience that cured him of any appetite for military conflict. The Thirty Years war, the setting for Mother Courage, was a pointless, grotesquely protracted, gruesome catastrophe for everyone except the handful of victors among the European aristocracy who profited from it. This is an assessment of the conflict to which no historian I've encountered would take exception. War for Brecht, as it is for Mother Courage by the end of the play, is hell – as it is assumed to be by most people who haven't lived through it, and known to be by nearly everyone who has.

Driven into exile by the Third Reich, Brecht began work on Mother Courage in Sweden in the summer of 1939; he was writing it when Germany invaded Poland. Ten years later, the play received its German premiere at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. The refugee playwright had circumnavigated the planet. The city to which he returned, once his home and the arena for his great successes, scandals and remarkable theatrical experiments, was now a wasteland of burnt, rat-infested rubble. The Reich was gone, the second world war had ended, but the cold war was heating up. The possibility of atomic annihilation overshadowed an uneasy peace. Brecht wrote:

(Read more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/sep/08/tony-kushner-mother-courage

 

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CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON ON ODON VON HORVATH: TRANSLATING A DRAMATIST WHO SAW NAZI GERMANY FROM THE INSIDE

(Hampton's article appeared in the Evening Standard, 8/26/09.)

 

Christopher Hampton translates the big questions

 

The critic Jean-Claude François memorably described Ödön von Horváth as “the black book of the Third Reich”: by which he meant that no other writer documented more circumstantially than Horváth the day-to-day experience of life in Nazi Germany in the years leading up to the Second World War. Bertolt Brecht, for example, sitting in exile in Scandinavia, wrote of Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, a title which could have covered any amount of émigré writing; for those in self-imposed exile, what seemed salient were the crimes and atrocities of the Nazi régime. But for those, like Horváth, who remained, what seemed striking was how little the texture of everyday life had changed, despite the manifest insanity of the truculently self-righteous morons so wilfully handed power by the German electorate in 1933.

 

(Read more)

 

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/article-23736973-details/Christopher+Hampton+translates+the+big+questions/article.do

ADAM KIRSCH ON LEONARD BERNSTEIN'S ART AND POLITICS

(Kirsch's article appeared in The New Republic, 8/21/09.)

 

Chic Radical by Adam Kirsch

 

It's a rare musician who requires a biography devoted solely to his or her political activities. But as Barry Seldes shows in Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician, Bernstein is one of those exceptional cases. For his entire adult life, Bernstein was perhaps the most famous composer and conductor in America--which is not the same thing as being the best--and he had no qualms about using his artistic fame to advance his political beliefs. Whenever there was a liberal cause that needed support, Bernstein was there: he was involved with the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee in the 1930s, supported Henry Wallace's Progressive Party in the 1940s, clashed with HUAC in the 1950s, marched on Selma in the 1960s, fought for gay rights and AIDS research and the NEA in the 1970s and 1980s. More problematically for his artistic legacy, he also sought to infuse his political views into his music. Many of Bernstein's biggest compositions, from West Side Story to The Age of Anxiety to Mass, were conceived as vehicles for his didactic liberalism.

(Read more)

http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=c1b3d9b6-4c49-4907-b49b-1230f9d2480b

PETER FILICHIA ON RABE'S 'STICKS AND BONES': 36 YEARS LATER

(Peter Filichia's Diary of August 19 ran on Theatermania.) 

 

A Sticky Situation for Joe Papp

36 years ago this week, CBS aired a TV version of a Tony-winning Broadway play – late at night, so as few people could see it as possible.

The play was David Rabe’s Sticks and Bones. Its main characters were Ozzie, Harriet, David and Ricky. Those who remember the early days of TV will recognize those character names from the TV series The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The weekly sitcom about a real-life family called the Nelsons debuted in 1952 and didn’t go off the air until, believe it or not, 1966.

And yet, who remembers anything significant about it?

(Read more)

http://www.theatermania.com/peterfilichia/

KAREN MALPEDE ON ‘THE BACCHAE’ (AT THE DELACORTE UNTIL AUGUST 30)

(Exclusive)

 

The Bacchae: The World’s Greatest Play

by Karen Malpede

 

            The Bacchae, playing now in Central Park, is the greatest of all Greek plays, perhaps the greatest play of all. Euripides wrote it at the end of his life while in exile living in his cave in Macedonia. I like to think of him, an old, disgruntled man, sitting alone with thoughts of death, watching from the shade of his stone arch while herds of sun-whipped women spun and turned in dappled light, looking like drunken fawns.  Women were let loose from confinement regularly but only for religious purposes.  He knew this; still, up close the antics of the freed females must have come as quite a shock to the citified man. Who knows what he saw them do?  

            Euripides would be thinking, too, of Athens, this city he’d left in scorn, which had betrayed its promised rectitude through imperial adventure after adventure, and was soon to dash its own democracy to death upon the shores of Sicily, grown over-extended militarily, cruel to its captives, narrow-minded in its market place and public life.

Tragedy had been invented to honor Dionysus, god of ecstasy and of the grape; his alter burned in the center of the orchestra, the dancing place.  Many of the gods appear fittingly in Greek tragedies, in the pro or epilogues and from their place apart on the roof of the stage house.  Euripides’ genius was to send Dionysus smashing into public life. No longer an imagined god around whose alter the chorus danced, nor a voice from above, but a living presence in the midst of the action, demanding recognition from the city that dishonors itself by refusing to honor him and exacting vengeance when recognition is denied. 

Recognition had been denied Euripides too many times in Athens, winning third prizes when clearly he deserved the first because Medea and other of his plays unsettled and disturbed.  Was he a feminist or a woman-hater?  Either way, he understood the Athenian fear of women, but more, of womanly ways, would bring them down.  A nation-state cannot simply be bent on conquering, on military adventure; it has to save itself for passion, and by passion, too.  But passion for what?  It’s easy, and correct, to say, man must honor all the gods—experience all emotional inevitabilities of life, also, of death.  Hyppolutus had been dragged to death by his horses for scorning Aphrodite, refusing the love of women.  Actaeon, too, was ripped apart by his own hunting dogs for denying Artemis, the virgin goddess of animals and the hunt and it happened in those same hills of Cithaeron, where his cousin Pentheus soon would perish, torn apart by his own mother.  Men deny their female selves at their peril.   Nations bent on war deny something, too.  

The women have danced upon and despoiled earth.  The god has also come to tell them this.  The women have made the land give milk and honey, but they have dishonored it, as well, by demanding too much, stealing too many resources, becoming drunk on their own bounty and beneficence.  They’ve forgotten someone, something, controls nature beyond themselves, that their work is to live in harmony, not excess. 

What is it Dionysus wants of Thebes?  Surely, he wishes honor for his mother, Semele.  He wants recognition that she was his mother. From her womb he was ripped by lightening sent by jealous Hera.  Semele was beloved of Zeus.  What can any of this mean?  Nice to love one’s mother.  Terrible to ruin a city over unrecognized mother-love, yet that is what he does.  He brings everyone, men and women, Pentheus’ mother Agave, his grandfather Cadmus, to their knees.  He smiles while they realize they have been capable of the vilest deeds.  Agave in a fit of madness dismembers her son, the only heir to the city.  She beheads him, possessed by a vision that he is a mountain lion and she the conqueror of the mighty beast. She tortures the son she loves by denying him even while he cries out to her, “mother, mother.” It is the primal dream of horror, dreamt equally by ravenous infant and stunned primipara.   How can anyone ever adequately care for another?  How can any mortal woman sate the child’s greedy maw?  Euripides reaches back to touch the psychological core.

Dionysus may be a god of vengeance let loose upon us, but he is something else—a progenitor of Christ, he is half-mortal.  He walks among us because he is also us.  We deny our similarity to the god with terrible consequences not for him but for Pentheus and for the city.  Pentheus is crucified in Dionysus’ stead, the god merely steps aside.  He escapes earthquake, fire; he bewitches the mortal man to commit sacrilege and he smiles.  We are not doomed to everlasting hell for denying Dionysus, only to suffer more than we can bear while we remain alive. But what does Dionysus want?  What does he expect from humankind?

  Euripides wanted recognition. In the most personal sense this is a bitter and self-serving play.  You drove me out by dishonoring my works; now look at what you’ve done to yourselves by denying the dramatic truths I brought.  He did not live to see this play produced.  It was taken to Athens by his son.  After the poet’s death his city could tolerate his poetry, the familiar story, only then. But by then it was too late for the city to save itself. 

Euripides is not Dionysus, of course, nor is he Pentheus. But they, his antagonists, are two halves of one another.  They’ve been torn, ripped in half before the play begins, we  watch self battling unrecognized self—and watch the ruination of the public life such ignorance of the self-same must bring.   The other is us and in us; ignore these facts at your civic peril.  The other is divine, as well.

Is there balm in this story?  Is there a position to be taken?  Is there lesson learned?  Are we to exalt in the “indomitableness of the human spirit?”  No, there is no such cant.  Euripides shows us human beings superior to gods only in our ability to mourn our losses, to love and grieve our dead.  The gods know nothing of this. They destroy with impunity. They gather up the pieces of no corpses. They kill us, no, worse, far worse, they loose in us the fatal rage that insists we kill our own, our nearest and our dearest, our youngest. We send them off, full of ideas of grandeur, to fight our wars, and only after they’ve been torn apart do we pause to mourn.  

There is no god of healing in this story.  Reconciliation is beyond us utterly; we may grieve our losses, decry our destructiveness, but to suffer we are doomed.  Thank you, Euripides for leaping past doctrine, reaching through sheer force of poetry beyond any idea of what is right or wrong, what might save us, for slaying ideology utterly.  For asking us to stand and be.  Sway in the wind. Rationality will kill us.  Irrationality will do the same.  Sit in a cave and watch the women dancing with abandon.  Feel terrified.    Absent yourself from the human struggle.  In this sense the play is profoundly Buddhist, Zen.  It would be good to take a break from conquest.  To listen, absorb, allow the poetry to enliven without anger, to let the adrenaline rush come from taking in the terrible beauty of the spectacle that is The Bacchae.  Not to need to control.  

 

© 2009 by Karen Malpede.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted by permission of the author.   

 

 

(Karen Malpede, M.F.A., is a playwright in the theater of war and witness tradition.  Her recent plays are:  “I Will Bear Witness” a stage adaptation of the Victor Klemperer diaries which won two Obies and toured internationally; “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” about a survivor of a rape camp during the war in Bosnia which had productions in Italy, Australia, and off-Broadway and won for the playwright the McKnight National Playwright’s Fellowship and is currently under development in Europe as a motion picture, “End of the Century.”   “Prophecy,” about the legacies of the Vietnam and Iraq wars, was produced to critical acclaim in London; featuring Maria Tucci or Kathleen Chalfant in the lead role, the play has been presented as a rehearsed reading at: The Kennedy Center, the Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92^nd St. Y, the Public Theater, the Cherry Lane Theater and New York Theater Workshop.  She has written essays published in anthologies and journals in the US and UK about theater of witness and her earlier contributions to theater history include one of the first books on women in theater, Women in Theatre: Compassion & Hope. Contact: 718-789-5404; kmalpede@earthlink.net; kmalpede@gmail.com.)

 

Shakespeare in the Park

THE BACCHAE

By EURIPIDES
Directed by JOANNE AKALAITIS
Original Music by PHILIP GLASS
Translated by NICHOLAS RUDALL

With April Armstrong, George Bartenieff, Sullivan Corey, André De Shields, Marisa Echeverría, Jonathan Groff, Tara Hugo, Jennifer Ikeda, Karen Kandel, Jennifer Nikki Kidwell, Alexa Kryzaniwsky, Vella Lovell, Joan MacIntosh, Anthony Mackie, Nana Mensah, Steven Rishard, Ereni Sevasti, Elena Shaddow, Rocco Sisto, Han Tang

AUGUST 11 - AUGUST 30

Performances of The Bacchae will be Tuesday through Sunday at 8pm
Added perf (No distribution/Stand-by line only): August 24
No perf: August 25

JoAnne Akalaitis returns to The Public Theater to present Greek tragedy as it was always meant to be seen – in the open air of the city. This visionary interpretation, featuring a lush choral score by Philip Glass, re-imagines the classic story about what happens when a government attempts to outlaw desire.

Artistic Staff for THE BACCHAE:

Scenic Design: JOHN CONKLIN
Costume Design: KAYE VOYCE
Lighting Design: JENNIFER TIPTON

Sound Design:  ACME SOUND PARTNERS

Soundscape:  DARRON L. WEST

Dramaturg:  JAMES LEVERETT

Music Director:  MICK ROSSI

Choreographer:  DAVID NEUMANN

Production Stage Manager:  MARTHA DONALDSON

 

More information, visit:  http://www.publictheater.org/content/view/126/219/

 

Delacorte Theatre

The outdoor Delacorte Theatre is the summer home of the annual "Shakespeare in the Park" production. Begun in 1957 by Joseph Papp as part of the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival the annual productions draw thousands to the open air theater at the heart of Central Park. Originally built as a temporary structure in 1962, the Delacorte Theater is the setting for the continuing series.

The theater is semi-circular in shape and the audience is treated to the sight the lovely summer landscape forming a backdrop to the stage. This includes Turtle Pond, and the almost dreamlike vista of Belvedere Castle looking down from above, waiting for its close up

Location: Mid-Park at 80th Street

Details: Southwest corner of the Great Lawn