Skip to footer

The Bard's bash goes global

As the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth arrives, chances are there's a festival devoted to the playwright near you.

|
Oregon Shakespere Festival
‘Romeo and Juliet’ at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

| Ashland, Ore.

It's that time of year when all the world seems to be a stage, to misquote Shakespeare.

From Coral Gables, Fla., to Fairbanks, Alaska, from England to Iraq, Shakespeare players are there to amaze and amuse you.

It's the anniversary of the Bard of Avon's birth (more or less; nobody knows for sure), and Shakespeare theater groups are gearing up for the busy vacation season.

By one count, there are some 70 Shakespeare festivals in the United States alone, many of them performing outdoors.

Can't get to a Shakespeare theater or festival? Maybe one will come to you.

The San Francisco Shakespeare Festival has a touring group playing mainly in schools and libraries, performing the essence of, say, "Macbeth" in a truncated 55-minute performance.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) here in Ashland sends out two-person teams of actors to schools – many of them tiny venues across the remote American West. (Stage fighting is a big hit with kids. A genuine sword is better than a lightsaber any day.)

The Oregon festival, one of the oldest and largest professional repertory theater companies in the US, performs 11 plays (four of them Shakespeare's) over an eight-month season in three theaters – one of them the oldest existing full-scale Elizabethan stage in the Western Hemisphere.

OSF also is commissioning 37 new plays (the number in Shakespeare's full canon) over a nine-year period – each focusing on a period of change, inspiration, or conflict in US history – as part of its "American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle."

The Royal Shakespeare Company is producing the "World Shakespeare Festival," some 70 productions performed around the bard's homeland, beginning this month and running through November. As part of this festival, London's Globe Theatre will present every one of Shakespeare's 37 plays (there's that number again), each in a different language.

Looking for nontraditional Shakespeare? OSF this year sets "Troilus and Cressida" and the Trojan War within today's conflict in Iraq. Coincidentally, the organization is hosting the visit by a troupe of 10 young Iraqi theater students from the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani – the first ever to perform Shakespeare publicly in Iraq.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to The Bard's bash goes global
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Music/2012/0419/The-Bard-s-bash-goes-global
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe