Biondello, rendering by Costume Designer Susan Mickey Barbara Gaines Artistic Director Table of Contents Carl and Marilynn Preface . .1 . Art That Lives . .2 . Thoma Endowed Chair Bard’s Bio . 3. The First Folio . .3 Criss Henderson Shakespeare’s England . 4. Executive Director The English Renaissance Theater . 5 The Courtyard-style Theater . 7. Timelines . 8 Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare Repertory Shakespeare’s in 1986, the company moved to its seven-story home on Navy Pier in 1999. In its Elizabethan-style courtyard theater, 500 seats on three levels wrap The Taming of the Shrew around a deep thrust stage—with only nine rows separating the farthest Dramatis Personae . .10 . Who’s Who . .11 . .seat . from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also features a flexible 180-seat The Story . 12 black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource Center, and a Shakespeare Act by Act Synopsis . 12. specialty. bookstall. In 2017, a new, innovative performance venue, The S omething Borrowed, Something New: Yard at Chicago Shakespeare, will expand CST's campus to include three Shakespeare’s Source. 14 To Have and To Hold: theaters. The year-round, flexible venue can be configured in a variety of Elizabethans and their Bonds of Marriage shapes and sizes with audience capacities ranging from 150 to 850, What’s in a (Genre’s) Name? . 15. defining the audience–artist relationship to best serve each production. Now in its thirty-first season, the Theater has produced nearly the entire Scholars’ Perspectives Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As Listening to Silence . 17. You. Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Edward III, Hamlet, Henry The Shrew Tames, Too. 19 Lost and Won . 20. IV. .Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, Henry VIII, Julius What the Critics Say . 22. Caesar. , King John, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A A Play Comes to Life Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, A Look Back at The Taming of the Shrew in Production. 29 Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The A Conversation with the Director . 34. Tempest, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Women’s Right to Vote. 36 Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Winter’s Tale. The Cult of Domesticity . .37 . President Woodrow Wilson . 37. Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the 2008 recipient of the Regional America’s Women’s Clubs. 39 Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after year have honored The Temperance Movement . 40. the Theater, including repeated awards for Best Production and Best Suffragette or Suffragist?. 40 Director, the two highest honors in Chicago theater. Suffragettes and Race. 40 Women's Suffrage Timeline . 42. Since Chicago Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young audiences has been an essential element in the realization of its mission. Team Shakespeare supports education in our schools, where Shakespeare Classroom Activities is part of every required curriculum. As a theater within a multicultural city, Before You Read the Play . 44 we are committed to bringing Shakespeare to life for tens of thousands As You Read the Play . 48. .of middle and high school students each year. Team Shakespeare’s After You’ve Read the Play . 59. The Performance: Preparing and Reflecting. 62 programming includes free teacher workshops, student matinees of To Listen or Not to Listen: main stage shows, post-performance discussions, comprehensive Audiobooks in Reading Shakespeare . 66. teacher handbooks, and an abridged, original production each year of Strategies for Teaching Shakespeare with Film . .68 . one of the “curriculum plays.” Team Shakespeare offers a region-wide A “Read-and-View” Teaching Strategy . 73. The Taming of the Shrew Film Finder . .78 . forum for new vision and enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our Classroom Warm-ups and Community Builders . .80 . schools. In 2012, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, Techno-Shakespeare . 86. .honored that vision with the prestigious Shakespeare Steward Award. Suggested Readings. 90 The 2017-18 Season offers a student matinee series for three of Chicago This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of teachers Shakespeare Theater’s full-length productions: in the fall, Shakespeare’s past and present, Chicago Shakespeare Theater artists, interns, The Taming of the Shrew directed by Artistic Director Barbara Gaines; educators, and scholars. Intern Madeline Dulabaum updated in the winter, Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti; and in the spring, Mary an earlier edition of The Taming of the Shrew handbook for this Stuart, written by Friedrich Schiller and adapted by Peter Oswald, as well production, contributed the essays focused upon America’s suffrage movement and the context for the framing device, as Shakespeare’s Macbeth directed by Aaron Posner and Teller. Also this written for Chicago Shakespeare’s upcoming production. Chicago winter, a 75-minute abridged version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will Shakespeare Theater gratefully acknowledges the groundbreaking be performed in The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater and will tour and indelible work of Dr. Rex Gibson and the Cambridge School to Chicago schools and theaters across the region. We hope that you Shakespeare Series, whose contributions to the field of teaching have helped shape our own work through the years. and your students will enjoy our work—and Shakespeare’s creative genius brought to life on stage. l Marilyn J. Halperin Director of Education Ray and Judy McCaskey Endowed Chair Roxanna Conner Education Associate ©2017, Chicago Shakespeare Theater Jason Harrington Education Outreach Manager Molly Truglia Learning Programs Manager The Taming of the Shrew is Shakespeare, storyteller and entertainer, at his theatrical best. From a twenty- first century perspective, it is also Shakespeare at his most controversial. This early comedy in the writer’s career shows a young playwright enamored not just with words but also with the sheer artifice of performance. Here, he creates a world where things seem to be something other than what they, in fact, are—a world overrun with role-playing and disguise-making. He also provides a “frame”—the set- up of Christopher Sly—through which we watch the story of Kate and Petruchio performed. What is a contemporary audience to do with Shrew’s gender politics? Director Barbara Gaines and Chicago playwright Ron West have created a new frame all their own. It is 1919 Chicago on the eve of Congress’s passage of the Ninetenth Amendment. A women’s club troupe plans to stage the only play in Shakespeare’s canon that remains for them unstaged, the one they’ve backburned as long as they possibly could. That play, of course, is The Taming of the Shrew… Introduction Art That Lives How can you help us give you the rama is a living art. It is written best performance we can? to be performed live before a l Please, no talking during the performance. D group of people who form an It distracts the actors as well as the people audience and experience it together, sitting nearby. just as you will here at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. This tradition l Respond naturally to our play. Emotions are part of performance and observance, of drama. We hope that you'll laugh, cry, and even of drama as communication, is an historically rich and gasp—but as a natural response to the story, and not complex one that reaches far back in time. Textual evidence in order to distract attention from the stage. from Egypt and Mesopotamia—even art like cave paintings l Please leave all “noisemakers”—food, gum, depicting men disguised as animals—reveals that since cell phones, iPods, etc.—back at school or on the ancient times, impersonation and imitation have been used bus. In a quiet theater, wrappers, munching—and not only ritualistically but also as a means of expression and even a phone’s vibration—are heard by all, the communication, a way to impart the knowledge of the community. actors included. The beginnings of Western drama further developed in the l No photographs of any kind, please. Flashbulbs religious ritual and festivals of the ancient Greeks, while can make the actors lose their focus and can be their theater also took on new emphasis as a sophisticated dangerous. Digital cameras, along with all other mode of storytelling, especially as a way of communicating kinds of recording devices, are prohibited, as is the history of a culture and imagining new heroic tales. The text-messaging. drama of Europe’s Middle Ages was closely tied to forms of religious observance, but the medievals also used theater to you are also a storyteller when you experience live theater. teach biblical stories, present the lives of saints, and creatively We hope you’ll enjoy your role—and will help us to give you a communicate the moral ideals of the community. It is this long dramatic experience that you’ll always remember. and varied tradition that Shakespeare and the Renaissance playwrights inherited—and from which they would both borrow and imagine new possibilities. Drama not only depicts human communication, it is human communication. But in the theater, unlike television or film, a [Theatrical performance] is essentially a two-way communication occurs between the actors and their sociable, communal affair. This is important. audience. When you experience theatrical storytelling, you are To resist this is, I think, to ruin one of the very not simply on the receiving end of this communicative process: important parts of the theatrical experience.