FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Dana Werdmuller: (831) 459-3160
dwerdmul@ucsc.edu
SHAKESPEARE SANTA CRUZ ANNOUNCES “SERIOUSLY FUNNY” SEASON
SANTA CRUZ, CA – Shakespeare Santa Cruz announces a slate of four plays for summer 2007, each one a unique exploration of serious comedy. According to SSC Artistic Director Paul Whitworth, “All four plays are innovative and prophetic in terms of their style and are considered trailblazers for the types of comedy they introduced in their time.” The plays share themes of isolation and liberation, each in a way that is both unique and “seriously funny.”
The natural beauty of the outdoor Festival Glen will play host to two Shakespeare offerings, Much Ado About Nothing and The Tempest. The indoor Theatre Arts Mainstage will be the setting for a mini Irish festival which celebrates the 50th and 100th anniversaries respectively of two classic Irish plays, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge. All four plays will be performed in repertory from July 17 through September 2, 2007.
Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare’s funniest comedies, a tale of deceit and disguise, and of the freedom gained by giving in to something larger than oneself. Mistrust and suspicion between the sexes is the fertile ground from which comedy springs: young lovers Hero and Claudio experience more than a few mishaps while confronting the risky business of entering into a romantic partnership, while Beatrice and Benedick are entrenched in spinsterhood and bachelorhood respectively, and are the only two characters unaware of their love for each other. "I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me." – Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing, Act I. Directed by Kim Rubinstein, Associate Artistic Director of the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.
Perhaps Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest forged a new style of theatre, one that pulled together the various strands of Shakespeare’s career by incorporating music and spectacle along with comedy, tragedy and romance. The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, a former duke shipwrecked on a desert island with his daughter Miranda by his usurping brother. In his isolation, he becomes a magician and master of all things in his tiny world. Years later, with his enemies now at his mercy, the central question is whether he remains isolated by choosing revenge or liberates himself through forgiveness. “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.” Prospero, The Tempest, Act IV. Directed by Kirsten Brandt, current Resident Director of San Jose Rep and former Artistic Director of the Sledgehammer Theatre in San Diego.
J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World opened in 1907 at a time of great political and cultural change, as Ireland was struggling against British rule. In Playboy, a tiny community in the rural West of Ireland is plunged into turmoil by the arrival of the fugitive Christy Mahon, a young man who has risen up against the tyranny of his father and killed him with a shovel. Poetic Irish imaginations run wild and the timid Christy is recreated overnight as a great hero of this small sea-swept town. A glorious feast of language, this greatest of Irish comedies is about how people are defined by their wildest hopes and dreams and what happens when those dreams comically bump into reality – drawing a tragi-comic parallel to contemporary society and our modern-day “heroes.” “A daring fellow is the jewel of the world, and a man that did split his father’s middle with a single clout should have the bravery of ten....” – Michael James, Playboy of the Western World, Act III. Directed by Robert Moss, Artistic Director of Syracuse Stage and founding director of the Playwrights Horizons theatre school in affiliation with New York University.
First produced in 1957, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a modern masterpiece. Beckett is considered by many to be the greatest poetic playwright of modern times. “The feeling which Mr. Beckett expresses on the stage is a note heard nowhere else in contemporary drama.” (Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times.) Beckett places his four characters in a sparse setting, each with their own extension of a more personal isolation: a wheelchair, blindness, a dust bin, a reluctant and conflicted spirit. In tandem with his characters’ spare environment, Beckett’s language is honed down to a distilled beauty, exploring comedy through the filter of the tragic inevitability of the human condition. “The whole thing is comical, I grant you that. What about having a good guffaw the two of us together?” – Hamm, Endgame. Directed by Peter Lichtenfels, formerly of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, Scotland and the Leicester Haymarket in England. He is current Chair of the Department of Theatre & Dance at UC Davis.
Artistic Director Paul Whitworth will perform in two roles this season, that of Hamm in Endgame and Old Mahon in Playboy of the Western World.
Subscriptions for the 2007 season of Shakespeare Santa Cruz go on sale in mid-April; single tickets will be available beginning mid-May. Both the Festival Glen and the Theatre Arts Mainstage are located on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. For more festival and ticket information, please visit the SSC web site at http://shakespearesantacruz.org or call the UCSC Ticket Office at (831) 459-2159.
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