Sam Waterston, James Shapiro and More to Discusses Shakespeare's Sonnets, 4/26

The Public Theater (Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis; Executive Director, Patrick Willingham) will continue its popular Public Forum season this month with SONNETS FOR THE CITY on Friday, April 26 at 7 p.m. at Joe's Pub at The Public. Presented in association with New York Magazine, this one-night-only event will feature insights from notable writers, contemporary artists, and members of the community, including celebrated young novelist Téa Obreht, New York Magazine book critic Kathryn Schulz, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, and acclaimed actor Sam Waterston.

To celebrate Shakespeare's birthday, the Public Forum will explore the magic of his sonnets. On Friday, April 26 at 7 p.m., one of the world's foremost Shakespeare scholars, James Shapiro, will share his insights on these much-loved poems: why Shakespeare wrote them, how they work, and what they do or don't tell us about their author. He will be joined by special guest Sam Waterston, a great Shakespearean actor who most recently played King Lear at The Public. Waterston will read some sonnets and talk about what they mean to him. In the second part of the program, Kathryn Schulz, the book critic of New York Magazine, will share her insights on how Shakespeare's sonnets relate to contemporary authors and the literature of our own time. Téa Obreht, author of the acclaimed novel The Tiger's Wife, will read a new poem inspired by Shakespeare's sonnets, as will a student from the DreamYard program in the Bronx.

Public Theater member tickets for SONNETS FOR THE CITY, priced at $24, are on sale now. Single tickets, priced at $29, go on sale Thursday, April 4, and can be purchased at (212) 967-7555, www.publictheater.org, or in person at The Public Theater box office at 425 Lafayette Street. The Library at The Public is open nightly for food and drink, beginning at 5:30 p.m.

PUBLIC FORUM, now in its third year, presents the theater of ideas. Curated by Jeremy McCarter, this series of lectures, conversations, and performances features leading voices in politics, media, and the arts. Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway, Cynthia Nixon, Michael Stuhlbarg, Sam Waterston, and former NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman have hosted its programs, which have featured the insights of Kurt Andersen, Carl Bernstein, David Brooks, David Byrne, Mary Schmidt Campbell, Nathan Englander, Hendrik Hertzberg, Arianna Huffington, Bill Irwin, Tony Kushner, Wynton Marsalis, Jay McInerney, Suzan-Lori Parks, Francine Prose, Reihan Salam, David Simon, Anna Deavere Smith, Ben Smith, Stephen Sondheim, Emma Straub, Sam Tanenhaus, Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, Marc Tracy, Damian Woetzel, the culture writers of New York Magazine, and young veterans of the war in Afghanistan - plus performances by Anne Hathaway, Michael Friedman, Gabriel Kahane, and Michael Cerveris, among others.

TÉA OBREHT was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. Her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a 2011 National Book Award Finalist. Her writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Esquire and The Guardian, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been named by The New Yorker as one of the 20 best American fiction writers under 40 and included in the National Book Foundation's list of Five Under 35.

KATHRYN SCHULZ is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010) and the book critic for New York Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, the Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. In 2012, she won the National Book Critic Circle's Nona Balakian Prize for Excellence in Reviewing. She is the former editor of the online environmental magazine Grist, and a former reporter and editor for The Santiago Times, of Santiago, Chile, where she covered environmental, labor, and human rights issues. She was a 2004 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in International Journalism, and has reported from throughout Central and South America, Japan, and, most recently, the Middle East. She is a graduate oF Brown University.

JAMES SHAPIRO is the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985. He is the author of several books, most recently, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. He has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants from institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He has written for The New York Times, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Sam Waterston has appeared at The Public in over 12 productions. He first performed as Silvius in As You Like It in 1963 for Shakespeare in the Park. His other Public Theater credits include Prince Hal in Henry IV, Parts I & II (1968); Cloten in Cymbeline (1971); Laertes, Hamlet, Polonius in Hamlet (1972, 1975, 2008); Duke in Measure for Measure (1976); Benedick, Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing (1972, 2004); and Prospero in The Tempest (1974). He most recently played Lear in King Lear in 2011 and appeared in the 2012 Shakespeare in the Park anniversary gala reading of Romeo & Juliet. His Lincoln Center credits include Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and A Doll's House. His film and television credits include The Great Gatsby, The Killing Fields, four Woody Allen films, Serial Mom, The Glass Menagerie, "I'll Fly Away," "Law & Order" (16 seasons), and Aaron Sorkin's HBO series, "The Newsroom."
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