SHAKESPEARE THEATRE COMPANY 21st Annual Table of Contents D.C.’s favorite Feature Letter from Michael Kahn 5 The Two Faces of Capital summer by Drew Lichtenberg 6 Program Synopsis 11 theatre event About the Playwright 13 Title Page 15 Cast 17 is back! Cast Biographies 18 PRESENTED BY Direction and Design Biographies 22 Shakespeare Theatre Company Tickets will be available Board of Trustees 8 online and in line! Shakespeare Theatre Company 26 Individual Support 28 Visit ShakespeareTheatre.org/FFA for more details on how to get your tickets via lottery Corporate Support 40 or at Sidney Harman Hall on the day of the Foundation and performance. Tickets for 2011–2012 Season Government Support 41 subscribers available through the Box Office Academy for Classical Acting 41 beginning July 5, 2011, at 10 a.m. For the Shakespeare Theatre Company 42 Join the Friends of Free Staff 44 JULIUS For All for tickets! Audience Services 50 Free For All would not be possible without Creative Conversations 50 CAESAR the hundreds of individuals who generously donate to support the program each year. “ Only with the help of the Friends of Free For All is STC able to offer free performances, All hail Julius Caesar! making Shakespeare accessible to … One of the best productions of this or any season.” Washington, D.C., area residents every summer. The Washingtonian In appreciation for this support, Friends of Free For All receive exclusive benefits during This Year's Production: the festival such as reserved Free For All tickets, the option to have tickets mailed in August 18–September 4 advance, special event invitations, program recognition and more. Seat reservations Sidney Harman Hall for Friends of Free For All vary by level of giving. For more information, please visit Sign up to receive email ShakespeareTheatre.org/FOFFA or call us at notifications at 202.547.1122, option 7. ShakespeareTheatre.org/Enews. Photos of Dan Kremer and the cast of STC’s 2008 production of Julius Caesar by Carol Rosegg. PRESENTS Dear Friend, As we present the final play of the 2010-2011 Season, The Merchant of Venice, and look toward next season’s 25th anniversary celebration, it seems only fitting to welcome a returning member of the STC family. Ethan McSweeny first joined STC as an intern in 1993. He later became my Assistant Director and went on to direct his first STC mainstage production, The Persians, in 2006. I am proud that STC has been a part of his artistic journey and delighted that he has taken on one of Shakespeare’s most controversial and emotionally rich plays to close the season. Though this is the final mainstage production of the season, I encourage you to attend the other productions and events taking place at our theatres this summer. STC will present an HD broadcast of Roundabout Theatre Company’s The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Brian Bedford in his Tony-nominated performance as Lady Bracknell, on June 28, followed by this season’s final NT Live screening, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard on July 11. August brings Free For All, a Washington tradition that continues with a re-staging of 2008’s Julius Caesar, kicking off our celebration of 25 classical years. I hope you will join me in the theatres this summer and for next season’s exciting anniversary celebration and performances in the fall. My best wishes for a wonderful summer, Michael Kahn Artistic Director, Shakespeare Theatre Company John Hurt in Krapp’s Basil Twist’s Last Tape Petrushka from Ireland’s Gate Theatre SUBSCRIBERS SAVE 10% 4 For more information, visit ShakespeareTheatre.org or call 202.547.1122 Photo of Sahr Ngaujah in FELA! by Monique Carboni. Photo of John Hurt in the Gate Theatre’s production of Krapp’s Last Tape 5 by Anthony Woods. Petrushka photo by Richard Termine. “The Venetians are fashionably swift. Shakespeare may have been frivolous,” wrote Auden, “and like all drawing from historical precedent, since frivolous people, they’re a little sad.” Venice was a constitutional Republic This strange sadness pervaded Jazz Age in which the Doge (or “Duke”) was New York, as the 1920s were bookended vested with representational power by by financial crises and characterized a senate comprised of patrician nobles by intense dynamism. Home to more and a select group of free citizens who than 7 million people, New York at the held the political power to call their time was the most populous city in Duke to petition. Similarly, in 1920s the world. Though its gaze was fixed New York, the still-powerful political squarely on the future, it was also a city machine of Tammany Hall had risen The Two Faces of Capital of internecine strife and turf wars. to power through similar quasi-legal arbitrations of New York’s immigrant by Drew Lichtenberg Downtown, the Jewish and Italian and ethnic disputes. Either way, it seems ghettoes abutted each other, along with clear in both time periods and in the those of numerous other ethnic groups play that personal stakes in capital are from southern and eastern Europe. Most impossible to separate from blind justice. immigrants were strivers and comers, dead set on achieving the American These historical and contextual facts may Dream. Prohibition gave rise to thousands help to provide a new lens for seeing of speakeasies and bootleggers in the The Merchant of Venice. It is a play which During the Renaissance, the Republic of in an instant, and the play opens with city. It also gave a leg up to organized remains challenging despite, or perhaps Venice was known not only for liberty, Antonio in just this situation: his fortune crime, notably in the form of gangs because of, its popularity through the social harmony and peace, but also for is out at sea and could crash upon the such as the Five-Pointers, a multi-ethnic ages. Though long overshadowed by the duplicity, guile and treachery. Early waves or bring an immense return. group led by Italians, and the Eastman tragic subplot of Shylock, a character 20th-century New York, in which this Gang, comprised mainly of Jews. Arnold who comes to dominate the center of the production of The Merchant of Venice is set, As W.H. Auden wrote, The Merchant of Rothstein, the legendary Jewish gangster, play, much of The Merchant of Venice in fact possessed a similar duality. It was a world Venice depicts “a newborn bourgeois gambler and racketeer, known as the lives in the realm of social comedy. Yet of opportunity, promising the American capitalist society, no longer feudal, not inspiration for Nathan Detroit in the it is a strange kind of comedy. Its tone Dream to each individual, yet it possessed yet industrial.” The play is peopled with musical Guys and Dolls, was responsible is complex, shifting between comic and an underworld filled with corruption aesthetes and acquisitive souls, and often for the fixing of the World Series in tragic registers, and its language is also and menace. This duality, the promise the currency they end up dealing in—the 1919, leading to the Black Sox scandal. a collision of opposites, by turns Biblical of opportunity and the threat of loss of engine for the play’s plot—is people. The and legalistic. The play’s unprecedented self, is the Janus-faced effect a capitalist large-hearted Antonio, for example, stakes The most famous scene in The Merchant mixture of social content within a economy has upon citizens of the world— his fortune on his beloved Bassanio; the of Venice, and one of the strangest, is the comic frame, which reaches beyond the whether it be the old world of Renaissance charming-but-poor Bassanio, in turn, trial—really more of an arbitration—that specific figure of Shylock to encompass Venice or the new world of New York. sets his sights on the wealthy Belmont doesn’t follow the format of any known a panorama of social inquiry, explains heiress Portia as his meal ticket; the court of law. Much as in his later legal both the play’s continuing popularity, Indeed, The Merchant of Venice, one of the Jewish moneylender Shylock ends up drama, Measure for Measure, Shakespeare and its controversial reputation. earliest of Shakespeare’s plays to focus claiming Antonio’s body as material uses the occasion to launch into a philosophical agon over the virtues on class, fuses together old and new collateral on a loan; and the similarly Drew Lichtenberg will join STC as Literary world problems. Ethnic and religious over-zealous Lorenzo steals away Jessica of justice in the abstract versus its Associate in July. He has previously served backgrounds, descended from medieval (commodified as a rich man’s daughter) consequences in material fact—and over as the Associate Dramaturg at Baltimore archetype, fix the identities of the play’s against her father Shylock’s wishes. In no the vexed question of the Jew in the Centerstage and holds a master's degree in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism characters in place, while the play’s other of Shakespeare’s plays is the word abstract versus the Jewish person as a from the Yale School of Drama. economic backdrop suggests the mutable “love” said so frequently, yet it is unclear living, breathing, suffering human being. modern self. Speculative financial precisely when, or if, these characters But the manner in which the Duke Special thanks to Ellen L. Berg, PhD, bubbles can make or remake a citizen are capable of actually falling in love. decides on his verdict is surprisingly Department of History, University of Maryland. 6 7 Board of Trustees Michael R.