Love's Labor's Lost Dramatis Personae
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Don Armado, rendering by Costume Designer Christina Poddubiuk Barbara Gaines Artistic Director Table of Contents Carl and Marilynn Thoma Endowed Chair Preface . .1 . Art That Lives . .2 . Criss Henderson Bard’s Bio . 3. Executive Director The First Folio . .3 Shakespeare’s England . 4. The English Renaissance Theater . 5 Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater The Courtyard-style Theater . 7. .dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare Timelines . 8 Repertory 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 Shakespeare’s levels wrap around a deep thrust stage—with only nine rows separating the farthest seat from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also features a Love’s Labor’s Lost flexible 180-seat black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource Center, Dramatis Personae . .10 . and. a Shakespeare specialty bookstall. In the autumn of 2017, a new, The Story . 11 innovative performance venue, The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare, will be Act by Act Synopsis . 11. completed. as a third performance space. The year-round, flexible venue S omething Borrowed, Something New: can be configured in a variety of shapes and sizes with audience capacities Shakespeare’s Source. 13 What’s In a Genre? The Nature of Comedy . .15 . ranging from 150 to 850, defining the audience–artist relationship to best serve each production. Scholars’ Perspectives Now in its thirtieth season, the Theater has produced nearly the entire Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As Words and Women . .17 . What the Critics Say . 18. You. Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Edward III, Hamlet, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure A Play Comes to Life for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A A Look Back at Love’s Labor’s Lost in Production . .26 . Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, A Conversation with the Director . 30. Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The The Age of Enlightenment . 33. Tempest, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Winter’s Tale. Classroom Activities Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the 2008 recipient of the Regional Before You Read the Play . 35 Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after year have honored As You Read the Play . 44. .the Theater, including repeated awards for Best Production and Best After You’ve Read the Play . 61. Director, the two highest honors in Chicago theater. The Performance: Preparing and Reflecting. 64 To Listen or Not to Listen: Since Chicago Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young Using Audiobooks to Read Shakespeare . 68 audiences has been an essential element in the realization of its mission. Strategies for Using Film to Teach Shakespeare. 70 Team Shakespeare supports education in our schools, where Shakespeare A “Read and View” Teaching Strategy . 75. is part of every required curriculum. As a theater within a multicultural city, Classroom Warm-ups and Community Builders . .78 . Techno-Shakespeare . 84. .we are committed to bringing Shakespeare to life for tens of thousands Suggested Readings. 87 of middle and high school students each year. Team Shakespeare’s Appendices . .89 . programming. includes free teacher workshops, student matinees of main stage shows, post-performance discussions, comprehensive teacher This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of teachers handbooks, and an abridged, original production each year of one of the past and present, Chicago Shakespeare Theater artists, interns, educators, and scholars. Intern Abigail Armato “curriculum plays.” Team Shakespeare offers a region-wide forum for new revised an earlier edition of the Love’s Labor’s Lost handbook vision and enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. In 2012, for this production. Chicago Shakespeare Theater gratefully the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, honored that vision acknowledges the groundbreaking and indelible work of Dr. with the prestigious Shakespeare Steward Award. The 2016-2017 Rex Gibson and the Cambridge School Shakespeare Series, Season offers a student matinee series for three of Chicago Shakespeare and The Folger Shakespeare Institute, whose contributions to the field of teaching have helped shape our own work through Theater’s full-length productions: in the fall, King Charles III, a new play the years. by Mike Bartlett; in the winter, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost; and in the spring, Shakespeare in Love, a new adaptation by Lee Hall of the Marilyn J. Halperin Director of Education film by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. Also this winter, a 75-minute Ray and Judy McCaskey Endowed Chair abridged version of Romeo and Juliet will be performed at the Theater Roxanna Conner Education Associate on Navy Pier and will tour to schools and theaters across the region. We Jason Harrington Education Outreach Manager hope that you and your students will enjoy our work—and Shakespeare’s Molly Truglia Learning Programs Manager creative genius brought to life on stage. l ©2017, Chicago Shakespeare Theater Shakespeare’s In the country of Navarre, we meet a young king determined to be remembered forever. Not for his noble valor. Not for his sense of justice. But for studying. All the time. To ensure that they keep their eyes on the prize, the king makes his three best friends take a vow that for three whole years they will not sleep, eat, or see women. Sounds easy, but let’s just say they get off to a rocky start. To be fair to these young men, what would you do if suddenly faced with a surprise visit from a picture-perfect princess and her three lovely ladies-in- waiting? You could, presumably, suggest that they pitch some tents outside your place, but that's poor politics, not to mention manners… Gentlemen in the audience, prepare to watch your foibles exposed. Shakespeare's satire of words, wit and wisdom punishes the pretensions of pretty much every person in pants. Ladies, sit back, behold, and bask in your sex's superior sensibility. By the time it's all over, wordplay might replace bookwork as Navarre's national pastime. So batter up, play ball—and may the best wit win! In t r o d u c t i o n 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 l Please, no talking during the performance. live before a group of It distracts the actors as well as the people people who form an audience and sitting nearby. experienceD it together, just as you will here at the Chicago Shakespeare l Respond naturally to our play. Emotions are part Theater. This tradition of performance of drama. We hope that you'll laugh, cry and even and observance, of drama as communication, is an historically gasp—but as a natural response to the story, and not rich and complex one that reaches far back in time. Textual in order to distract attention from the stage. evidence from Egypt and Mesopotamia—even art like cave l Please leave all “noisemakers”—food, gum, paintings depicting men disguised as animals—reveals that cell phones, iPods, etc.—back at school or on the since ancient times, impersonation and imitation have been bus. In a quiet theater, wrappers, munching—and used not only ritualistically but also as a means of expression even a phone’s vibration—are heard by all, the and communication, a way to impart the knowledge of actors included. the community. l No photographs of any kind, please. Flashbulbs The beginnings of Western drama further developed in the can make the actors lose their focus and can be religious ritual and festivals of the ancient Greeks, while dangerous. Digital cameras, along with all other their theater also took on new emphasis as a sophisticated kinds of recording devices, are prohibited, as is mode of storytelling, especially as a way of communicating text-messaging. the history of a culture and imagining new heroic tales. The drama of Europe’s Middle Ages was closely tied to forms of A live performance depends upon its audience. In the theater, religious observance, but the medievals also used theater the audience hears and sees the actors, just as the actors to teach biblical stories, present the lives of saints, and hear and see the audience. When the actors experience a creatively communicate the moral ideals of the community. responsive, interested audience, their work is at its best—full of It is this long and varied tradition of community engagement animation and energy. When the actors sense disinterest, they and communication through drama that Shakespeare and the too are distracted, and the play they create is less interesting. Renaissance playwrights inherited—and from which they would One actor described the experience of live performance as a both borrow and imagine new possibilities. story told by the actors and audience together. In this sense, Drama not only depicts human communication, it is human you are also a storyteller when you experience live theater. communication. But in the theater, unlike television or film, a We hope you’ll enjoy your role—and will help us to give you a two-way communication occurs between the actors and their dramatic experience that you’ll always remember. l audience. When you experience theatrical storytelling, you are not simply on the receiving end of this communicative process: [Theatrical performance] is essentially a the audience, as a community, is also a participant.