Cast Set For Ken Ludwig's DEAR JACK, DEAR LOUISE At Shakespeare & Company

Casting has been announced for the Berkshires premiere of Tony Award-winning playwright Ken Ludwig's Dear Jack, Dear Louise at Shakespeare & Company, slated to run May 26 through July 30, opening Sunday, May 28 outdoors at The Roman Garden Theatre.

Directed by Ariel Bock and bolstered by the award-winning design team of Govane Lohbauer (Costume Designer), Patrick Brennan (Scenic Designer), and Amy Altadonna (Sound Designer), Ken Ludwig's Dear Jack, Dear Louise is a comedic and touching look at life in 1942, complete with nods to music, theater, and literature. Inspired by the WWII courtship of Ludwig's parents, Dear Jack, Dear Louise earned the Charles MacArthur Award for Best New Play of the Year and Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play, both in 2020.

This two-hander will feature David Gow, returning for his fifth season with Shakespeare & Company, as Jack, and Zoya Martin, making her Berkshires debut, as Louise.

David Gow

(he/him) holds a BFA from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and has appeared in several roles on both stage and screen. His recent film credits include The Intruder and Chrissy Judy (Apple TV); television credits include The Girls on the Bus (HBO), The Good Fight, Madam Secretary (CBS), and Jon Glaser Loves Gear (truTV). On New York theater stages, he's appeared in Burning Leaves (Duke Theater), Chokehold (14th St. Y), What I First Desired (Soho Playhouse), Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone (Workshop Theater), Bleach (Wilson's Lounge), and Decky Does a Bronco (Royal Family Productions), and regionally, he's appeared in Up The Hill (Eugene O'Neill Center), Peter and the Starcatcher (SPAC), Pirira, Giant Void in my Soul, and The Ground on Which We Stand (Luna Stages), The Group (Great Barrington Public), Why Do You Stand There In The Rain (Edinburgh Fringe), and Scooter Thomas Makes It To The Top of the World (Hollywood Fringe). At Shakespeare & Company, he's appeared in Mothers and Sons, Waverly Gallery, and last season's Measure for Measure.

Zoya Martin

(she/her) is making her Shakespeare & Company debut this season. She is a recent MFA graduate from the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training in Sarasota, Fla. Her theater credits include Margaret Leavitt in Silent Sky, Penelope in Looking for Ithaca (Asolo Repertory Theatre); Cathleen in Thirst (Urbanite Theatre); Malvolia in Twelfth Night, Henrietta in The Learned Ladies, Abby in Belleville, and Harriet Smith in Emma: The Musical. Voice and Dialect coaching credits include Sense & Sensibility (FSU/Asolo Conservatory) and The Burdens (Urbanite Theatre). She received her BFA from Azusa Pacific University, Calif.

This production has been generously sponsored by the Friedman Family, in honor of Roberta Friedman. Tickets range from $22 to $62 - tickets to previews are $10 less - and are on sale now at shakespeare.org, or by calling the Box Office at (413) 637-3353.

About Shakespeare & Company

Shakespeare & Company was founded in 1978 by Tina Packer. Located in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the Company offers performance, education, and actor-training opportunities year-round, and attracts more than 40,000 patrons annually with a core of more than 150 artists.

About the Creative Team

Ken Ludwig has had six shows on Broadway, seven in London's West End, and many of his works have become a standard part of the American repertoire. His 32 plays and musicals have been performed in more than 30 countries in more than 20 languages and are produced throughout the U.S. every night of the year.

Lend Me a Tenor won two Tony Awards and was called "one of the classic comedies of the 20th century by The Washington Post. Crazy For You was on Broadway for five years and won the Tony and Olivier Awards for Best Musical.

In addition, Ludwig has won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery of the Year, two Laurence Olivier Awards, two Helen Hayes Awards, and the Edwin Forrest Award for Contributions to the American Theater. His plays have starred Alec Baldwin, Carol Burnett, Tony Shaloub, Joan Collins, and Hal Holbrook, among others.

His stage version of Murder on the Orient Express was written expressly at the request of the Agatha Christie Estate and had its European premiere at the Chichester Festival Theatre in June of 2022. His play Dear Jack, Dear Louise, won the 2020 Charles MacArthur Award for Best New Play of the Year. His newest plays include Lend Me A Soprano, premiering at The Alley Theatre in fall 2022; Moriarty, opening at Cleveland Playhouse in spring 2023; Pride and Prejudice, Part 2: Napoleon at Pemberley; Lady Molly of Scotland Yard.

His book How To Teach Your Children Shakespeare, published by Penguin Random House, won the Falstaff Award for Best Shakespeare Book of the Year, and his essays are published in the Yale Review. He is a graduate of Harvard and Cambridge and is a frequent guest speaker for groups as varied as The Oxford-Cambridge Society, The Jane Austen Society of North America, The Folger Shakespeare Library, and The Baker Street Irregulars.

Ariel Bock has been an actor, director, and voice teacher at Shakespeare & Company for more than 20 years, she's served as Artistic Associate and Producing Associate, and has been on the faculty as an acting or voice teacher at Dartmouth College, Smith College, and MIT, and has led many workshops both for professional and pre-professional actors and for those interested in Theater-in-Education.

Govane Lohbauer (she/her) is currently celebrating her 42nd Season with Shakespeare & Company. Selected credits include: The Approach, An Iliad, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Martha Mitchell Calling (play and film), Twelfth Night, As You Like It; The Tempest, Ugly Lies the Bone, Or..., It's a Wonderful Life, Henry V, Mother of the Maid, Shakespeare's Will, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), Private Lives, Loves Labor's Lost, Kaufman's Barbershop, The Learned Ladies, Women of Will, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Taster, Mengelberg and Mahler, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Shirley Valentine, Golda's Balcony, The Ladies Man, Rough Crossing, Enchanted April, Ice Glen, Lettice and Lovage, House of Mirth, Glimpses of the Moon and many years of the Education Department's Fall Festival and Tour productions including Shakespeare & the Language That Shaped a World film for Shakespeare's Birthday in 2021.

Patrick Brennan (he/him) is entering his 17th Season at Shakespeare & Company. Selected Set Design credits include Much Ado About Nothing, Morning After Grace, Mothers and Sons, Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, Roman Fever / Fullness of Life, It's A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, The How and the Why, Henry V, Mother of the Maid, Shakespeare's Will, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Private Eyes, Master Class, Heroes, Beauty Queen of Leenane, Accomplice, Cassandra Speaks, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, Parasite Drag, 39 Steps, Santaland Diaries, Private Lives, The Learned Ladies, Women of Will, The Memory of Water, The Hollow Crown, Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins, War of the Worlds, Mother Courage, Richard III, Winter's Tale, and The Liar. He was a designer and performer in Dibble Dance at Shakespeare & Company and the Colonial Theatre. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Interior Design from Academy of Art College, San Francisco, Calif.

Amy Altadonna (she/her) holds several Sound Design credits with Shakespeare & Company, including King Lear, The Chairs, Time Stands Still, Merry Wives of Windsor, The Children, HIR, Creditors, Heisenberg, 4000 Miles, The Wharton Comedies, God of Carnage, Or, Ugly Lies the Bone, The Taming, The Unexpected Man,and Red Velvet. Other credits include Eureka Day, Joan, Cal in Camo, Dry Land, Seven Minutes in Heaven (Colt Coeur); Unraveled and Pressing Matters (MBL Productions), and American Daughter and Glengarry Glen Ross (NYU Tisch). Regional credits include All's Well That Ends Well (OSF), Dear Elizabeth (Dorset Theatre Festival), Julius Caesar (Actors Shakespeare Project), How I Learned to Drive (Round House, MD), Our Town (Alabama Shakespeare Festival), Death of a Salesman, Fences, The Hampton Years (Virginia Stage Company), and Peter and the Starcatcher and Skin of Our Teeth (Perseverance Theater). She is an Undergraduate Program Director at the University of Massachusetts.

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