The American Shakespeare Center’s 2017/18 Wicked Folly Tour comes to Farmville with a performance of The Taming of the Shrew on Tuesday, September 19, 2017 at 7 PM in Jarman Auditorium. Doors open at 6:30 with pre-show music. No tickets are required. This is the fifth consecutive performance sponsored by the Department of English & Modern Languages and Hampden-Sydney College.
This hilarious comedy is much more than a battle of the sexes; it is also a profound look at the necessity of play in our lives. This production includes Shakespeare's Induction, which presents the Kate and Petruchio story as a play within the play. Blending romantic comedy and outlandish farce, Shakespeare gives us a love story of psychological liberation and the mysteries of being married.
“In contemporary parlance, this is a rom-com,” says director Jemma Alix Levy. “Katherine’s fight to establish herself as equal to the men around her comes wrapped in the story of what happens when we fall in love. This is a play about how we change ourselves for others, both by choice and unknowingly. It looks at the ways in which we all perform for each other. Shakespeare uses comedy to make us look closely at how many of the compromises we make – to fit in, to attract others, to get what we want, to find happiness – are worth it, and how many are utterly ridiculous.”
The ASC brings a unique performance style to Jarman, blending Shakespeare’s stagecraft with modern sensibility. The company uses Shakespeare’s staging conditions: universal lighting, minimal sets, character doubling, cross-gender casting, and live music. Shakespeare’s performance company couldn’t turn the lights out on the audience; actors and audience shared the same light. The Wicked Folly Tour shares light with the audience throughout the performance for a unique brand of audience contact rarely seen in theatre today.
The 2017/18 Wicked Folly Tour is the ASC’s 29th annual tour. Founded as Shenandoah Shakespeare Express in 1988, the ASC grew to international prominence and is now the home of the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre in Staunton, VA. ASC on Tour has performed in 46 US states, one US territory, and five other countries. The Wicked Folly Tour features Hilary Caldwell, Josh Clark, Topher Embrey, Ally Farzetta, J.C. Long, Mitchell McCollum, Kyle Powell, Annabelle Rollison, Ronald Román-Meléndez, Calder Shilling, and Constance Swain.
*********************************************
The American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA, recovers the joys and accessibility of Shakespeare’s theatre, language, and humanity by exploring the English Renaissance stage and its practices through performance and education. The ASC Blackfriars Playhouse, the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre, is open year-round for productions of classic and modern plays, which have been hailed by The Washington Post as "shamelessly entertaining" and by The Boston Globe as "phenomenal…bursting with energy." Founded in 1988 as Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, the organization became the American Shakespeare Center in 2005 and can be found online at www.americanshakespearecenter.com.
Photo credit: Annabelle Rollinson (Kate) and Ronald Román-Meléndez (Petruchio) in the American Shakespeare Center's The Taming of the Shrew. Photo by Michael Bailey.