the of Barbara Gaines Criss Henderson Artistic Director Executive Director Preface ................................................................................................3 Art That Lives ..................................................................................4 Bard’s Bio ...........................................................................................4 The First Folio ..................................................................................6 Shakespeare’s England ....................................................................6 Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater The Renaissance Theater ...............................................................7 dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Courtyard-style Theater .................................................................9 Shakespeare Repertory in 1986, the company moved to its Minstrels, Miracles, Magic, and Shakespeare: seven-story home on Navy Pier in 1999. In its Elizabethan-style A Brief History of Touring ........................................................11 courtyard theater, 500 seats on three levels wrap around a deep Timelines .........................................................................................14 thrust stage—with only nine rows separating the farthest seat from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also features a flexible 180-seat black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource Center, and a Shakespeare specialty bookstall. Dramatis Personae ........................................................................16 In its first 24 seasons, the Theater has produced nearly the entire Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, The Story .........................................................................................16 As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Hamlet, Henry IV Act by Act Synopsis ......................................................................17 Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, Julius Caesar, King Something Borrowed, Something New ...................................19 John, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, What’s in a Genre? Looking at Comedy ..................................21 The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer A Scholar’s Perspective: Seven Theories of Comedy ........... 23 Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Richard II, What the Critics Say ......................................................................26 Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Winter’s Tale. Playing Around with Comedy: Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the 2008 recipient of the A Look Back at The Comedy of Errors ........................................36 Regional Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after A Conversation with Director David H. Bell .........................40 year have honored the Theater, including repeated awards for Scenic Designer Tom Burch Sets the Stage .............................47 Best Production and Best Director, the two highest honors in A Thread from Costume Designer Ana Kuzmanic ..............48 Chicago theater. Art and America’s Great Depression ........................................49 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, Theater Warm-Ups .......................................................................51 where Shakespeare is part of every required curriculum. As a Before You Read the Play ............................................................55 theater within a multicultural city, we are committed to bringing As You Read the Play ...................................................................60 Shakespeare to a young and ethnically diverse audience of nearly After You’ve Read the Play ..........................................................72 50,000 students each year. Team Shakespeare’s programming Preparing for the Performance ...................................................74 includes free teacher workshops, student matinees of mainstage shows, post-performance discussions, comprehensive teacher Back in the Classroom ..................................................................76 handbooks, and an abridged, original production each year Techno Shakespeare ......................................................................78 for student and family audiences. Team Shakespeare offers a Suggested Readings .......................................................................82 region-wide forum for new vision and enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. Cover illustrations: Original renderings by Costume Designer Ana Kuzmanic for CST’s 2010 production of The Comedy of Errors The 2009–10 Season offers a student matinee series for Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s productions of Shakespeare’s Richard III in the fall and The Taming of the Shrew in the spring, as well as Noël Coward’s Private Lives this winter. Also this winter, Chicago Shakespeare presents especially for students a 75-minute This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of teachers abridged adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, at its theater on past and present, Chicago Shakespeare Theater artists and Navy Pier and on tour to schools and theaters across the region. educators, and scholars, past and present. Chicago Shakespeare We hope that you and your students will enjoy our work—and Theater gratefully acknowledges the work of Dr. Rex Gibson Shakespeare’s creative genius brought to life on stage. and the Cambridge School Shakespeare Series, and The Folger Shakespeare Institute, whose contributions to the field of Marilyn J. Halperin, Director of Education teaching have helped shape our own ideas through the years. Andie Thomalla, Education Outreach Manager Rachel Hillmer, Education Associate Production Sponsor ur word “error” (that word we like to avoid whenever humanly possible), came to us from the Romans and from their word meaning “to go astray, to wander.” The Comedy of Errors is a comedy like no other that Shakespeare ever wrote again. It is undeniably (unless we’re in error…) his fastest, wackiest, dizziest play—the result of having not just one, but two sets of identical brothers, and all four equally clueless that their twins are in town and causing total confusion. Everywhere they go, they’ve just been... Remember the last time you realized that you were totally clueless? About a math problem you couldn’t solve. Or finding your way around a new school. Or maybe about somebody’s feelings for you. When we’re clueless—as we all inevitably are one time or other—we’re inclined, like the characters in Shakespeare’s Comedy, to wander. You’ll see them wandering. From place to place looking for family. Away from home looking for love. They even end up wandering into the arms of people they think they know but really don’t. (Does any of this sound in the least familiar?) But Shakespeare lets us laugh, really laugh, at all those errors they—and we—make. In fact, he makes us laugh a lot at them. So, welcome to the world of Shakespeare’s play devoted to the comedy of human error! PICTURED FROM TO P : DOUGLAS VICKERS , ROSS LEHMAN AND KE V IN GUDAHL , P HOTO BY LIZ LAUREN ; TIMOTHY GREGORY , KRAIG SWARTZ , JAMES FITZERALD AND TIM DECKER , P HOTO BY LIZ LAUREN ; BLAINE HOGAN , BRADEN MORAN , KRISHNA LEFAN AND WILL DICKERSON , P HOTO BY MICHAEL BROSILOW ; WILLIAM DICK AND NORM BOUCHER , P HOTO BY LIZ LAUREN ; ANGELA INGERSOLL , SEAN FORTUNATO AND KYMBERLY MELLEN , P HOTO BY LIZ LAUREN ; BLAINE HOGAN , JOE SCHENCK AND JOSÉ ANTONIO GARCIA , P HOTO BY MICHAEL BROSILOW [Theatrical performance] is essentially a sociable, communal affair. This is important. To resist this is, I think, to ruin one of the very important parts of the theatrical experience. rama is a living art. It is Let the play and let the fact that temporarily you are not written to be performed live your private self, but a member of a closely-fused group, before a group of people who make it easy for the performance to ‘take you out of yourself.’ form an audience and together This, I suggest, is the object of going to a play… to be taken experience a play. Ancient cave out of yourself, out of your ordinary life, away from the paintings depict men disguised ordinary world of everyday. —Tyrone Guthrie, 1962 as animals. Since ancient times, impersonation and imitation have served man in his effort to express himself and to communicate his experience. The drama of western civilization has its roots in the ancient Greeks’ religious rituals and observances. Until the Renaissance, when Shakespeare wrote, drama was u Emotions are part of drama. We hope that closely tied to religious beliefs and practice. you’ll laugh, cry and even gasp—as an honest, spontaneous response to the story, not in order to Drama not only depicts human communication, it is distract attention from the stage. human communication. In theater, unlike television or film, there is a two-way communication that occurs u Please keep all “noisemakers”—food, gum, between the actors and their audience. The audience electronics, etc.—back at school or on the bus! In hears and sees the actors, and the actors hear and see a quiet theater, wrappers and munching are heard the