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Macbeth on Three Levels Wrap Around a Deep Thrust Stage—With Only Nine Rows Dramatis Personae 14 Separating the Farthest Seat from the Stage

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Macbeth on Three Levels Wrap Around a Deep Thrust Stage—With Only Nine Rows Dramatis Personae 14 Separating the Farthest Seat from the Stage Weird Sister, rendering by Mieka Van Der Ploeg, 2019 Table of Contents Barbara Gaines Preface 1 Artistic Director Art That Lives 2 Carl and Marilynn Thoma Bard’s Bio 3 Endowed Chair The First Folio 3 Shakespeare’s England 5 Criss Henderson The English Renaissance Theater 6 Executive Director Courtyard-Style Theater 7 Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater A Brief History of Touring Shakespeare 9 Timeline 12 dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare Repertory in 1986, the company moved to its seven-story home on Navy Pier in 1999. In its Elizabethan-style Courtyard Theater, 500 seats Shakespeare's Macbeth on three levels wrap around a deep thrust stage—with only nine rows Dramatis Personae 14 separating the farthest seat from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also The Story 15 features a flexible 180-seat black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource Act by Act Synopsis 15 Center, and a Shakespeare specialty bookstall. In 2017, a new, innovative S omething Borrowed, Something New: performance venue, The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare, expanded CST's Shakespeare’s Sources 18 campus to include three theaters. The year-round, flexible venue can 1606 and All That 19 be configured in a variety of shapes and sizes with audience capacities Shakespeare, Tragedy, and Us 21 ranging from 150 to 850, defining the audience-artist relationship to best serve each production. Now in its thirty-second season, the Theater has Scholars' Perspectives produced nearly the entire Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Hereafter 23 Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Why Teach Macbeth? 25 Cymbeline, Edward III, Hamlet, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry What the Critics Say 28 VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of A Play Comes to Life Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, A Look Back at Macbeth in Performance 40 Dueling Macbeths Erupt in Riots! 45 Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Primary Creative Artist Statement 46 Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen Conversation with the Director 47 of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Winter’s Tale. Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the 2008 recipient of the Regional Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after year have honored the Classroom Activities Theater, including repeated awards for Best Production and Best and Resources Director, the two highest honors in Chicago theater. Since Chicago Before You Read the Play 50 Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young audiences has been As You Read the Play 58 an essential element in the realization of its mission. Team Shakespeare After You Read the Play 72 supports education in our schools, where Shakespeare is part of the The Performance: Preparing and Reflecting 76 required curriculum. As a theater within a multicultural city, we are Classroom Warm-ups and Community Builders 82 committed to bringing Shakespeare to life for tens of thousands of middle Teaching Macbeth with Film 88 and high school students each year. Team Shakespeare’s programming Techno-Shakespeare 93 includes free teacher workshops, student matinees of main stage shows, Suggested Readings 98 post-performance discussions, comprehensive teacher handbooks, and an abridged, original production each year of one of the “curriculum This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of plays.” Team Shakespeare offers a regionwide forum for new vision and teachers past and present, Chicago Shakespeare enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. In 2012 the Folger Theater artists, interns, educators, and scholars Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, honored that vision with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater gratefully acknowledges prestigious Shakespeare Steward Award. The 2018-19 Season offers the groundbreaking and indelible work of Dr Rex a student matinee series for two of Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s full- Gibson and the Cambridge School Shakespeare length productions: in the winter, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Series, whose contributions to the field of teaching Dream directed by Joe Dowling, and in the spring, Shakespeare’s Hamlet have helped shape our own work through the years directed by Artistic Director Barbara Gaines. Also this winter, a 75-minute abridged version of Macbeth will be performed at the Theater on Navy Marilyn J. Halperin Director of Education Pier and will tour to schools across the region. We hope that you and your Ray and Judy McCaskey Chair students will enjoy our work—and Shakespeare’s creative genius brought Jason Harrington Education Outreach Manager to life on stage. • Sara B.T. Thiel Public Humanities Manager Molly Truglia Learning Programs Manager ©2019, Chicago Shakespeare Theater macbeth Written by William Shakespeare | Directed by Marti Lyons What's done is done. Macbeth’s world is the world of nightmare. Where men’s worst thoughts and actions are simultaneous. Where reality and unreality become interchangeable shape-shifters. Fair is foul and foul is fair. Fear and paranoia infect this world and the people who inhabit it. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the story of a man who comes to isolate himself from his humanity—and of a couple, a king, a family, and a nation torn asunder in the process. As a human being wrestles with his conscience and with his “fate,” and chooses a tragic path of bloodshed, we are there to bear witness. introduction Art That Lives How can you help us give you the rama is a living art. It is best performance we can? written to be performed live l Please, no talking during the performance. before a group of people who D It distracts the actors as well as the people form an audience and experience sitting nearby. it together, just as you will here at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. l Respond naturally to our play. Emotions are This tradition of performance and part of drama. We hope that you'll laugh, cry, and observance, of drama as communication, is a historically even gasp—but as a natural response to the story, rich and complex one that reaches far back in time. Textual and not in order to distract attention from the evidence from Egypt and Mesopotamia—even art like cave stage. paintings depicting men disguised as animals—reveals l Please leave all “noisemakers”—food, gum, that since ancient times, impersonation and imitation cell phones, iPods, etc.—back at school or on the have been used not only ritualistically but also as a means bus. In a quiet theater, wrappers, munching—and of expression and communication, a way to impart the even a phone’s vibration—are heard by all, the knowledge of the community. actors included. The beginnings of Western drama further developed in the l No photographs of any kind, please. religious ritual and festivals of the ancient Greeks, while Flashbulbs can make the actors lose their focus their theater also took on new emphasis as a sophisticated and can be dangerous. Digital cameras, along mode of storytelling, especially as a way of communicating with all other kinds of recording devices, are the history of a culture and imagining new heroic tales. The prohibited, as is text-messaging. drama of Europe’s Middle Ages was closely tied to forms of religious observance, but the medievals also used theater When the audience is unengaged, the play they create is to teach biblical stories, present the lives of saints, and less dynamic and compelling. Actors have described the creatively communicate the moral ideals of the community. experience of live performance as a story told by the cast It is this long and varied tradition that Shakespeare and the members and audience together. In this way, you are also a Renaissance playwrights inherited—and from which they storyteller when you experience live theater. We hope you’ll would both borrow and imagine new possibilities. enjoy your role—and will help us to give you a dramatic experience that you’ll always remember. Drama not only depicts human communication, it is human • communication. But in the theater, unlike television or film, a two-way communication occurs between the actors [Theatrical performance] is essentially and their audience. When you experience theatrical a sociable, communal affair. This is storytelling, you are not simply on the receiving end of this important. To resist this is, I think, to ruin communicative process: the audience, as a community, is one of the very important parts of the also a participant. We are quite used to thinking about the theatrical experience. Let the play and let actors’ roles in a play, but may find it strange to imagine the fact that temporarily you are not your ourselves, the audience, playing an important role in this private self, but a member of a closely fused living art. Because theater is art that lives, each performance group, make it easy for the performance to is guaranteed to be different, depending in part upon an ’take you out of yourself.’ This, I suggest, is audience’s response. A live performance depends upon its the object of going to a play…to be taken audience. In the theater, the audience hears and sees the out of yourself, out of your ordinary life, actors, just as the actors hear and see the audience. When away from the ordinary world of everyday. the actors experience a responsive, interested audience, —TYRONE GUTHRIE, 1962 their work is at its best—full of animation and energy. 2 Macbeth • 2019 introduction During his career, Shakespeare wrote or collaborated Bard's Bio on what most scholars now agree upon as thirty-eight plays.
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