The Guerrilla Shakespeare Project Presents The TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, 1/7-17, 2010
By: Gabrielle Sierra Nov. 20, 2009
The Guerrilla Shakespeare Project will bring William Shakespeare's rarely produced, controversial, tragicomedy THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN to the Medicine Show Theatre on January 7 to 17, 2010.
How GSP Is Doing It
The company of nine actors tackles the crisscrossing plots and subplots, aiming its focus on what's essential, heartbreaking and hilarious in Shakespeare's tragicomic romance. The GSP creative team of designers, composers and choreographers applies its muscular theatrical style to a 90-minute, smartly pared-down text that vaults the elements and players through their story set in golden, ancient Greece.
GSP blends traditions of classical acting with updated concepts of style, behavior, dress, music and mood. Ancient Athens will be made new and now, when The Players meet in a gilded, forested world where duels ensue and doo-wop ditties set the tone. If this production hits its mark, it will be impossible to foretell whether the action of the play ends in ecstatic celebration or utter devastation, and it will be wild ride.
The Team
The cast features GSP company members Jacques Roy*, Jordan Reeves*, Kimiye Corwin*, Ginger Eckert* and Jordan Kaplan*, as well as GSP newcomers Craig Divino*, Zack Fine*, Scott Raker*, and Lindsay Torrey*
Directed by Diana Buirski, Set by Tristan Jeffers, Lighting by Tom Schwans, Costumes by Lydia Franz & James King, Sound & Music by Charles Shell & Jane Pfitsch, Fight Choreography by Craig Divino & Jordan Reeves, Stage Managed by Patricia Lynn*
* Appears Courtesy of Actors' Equity
A more complete Creative Team list accompanies this release.
Where & When & How
Medicine Show Theatre549 West 52nd Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues
Nearest subway: C/E to 50th or N/R to 49th
January 7 to 17
Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.
Fridays & Saturdays at 8 p.m.
Sundays at 3 p.m.
All tickets: $18
Why Two Noble Kinsmen
Though larger companies may see the risk of producing the relatively unproven Two Noble Kinsmen as too great, it is a boon for GSP. It's as if they've happened upon some hip, hidden treasure to which they are bringing all their skills and creativity. Shakespeare lovers aren't looking to younger companies for an opportunity to see a definitive Hamlet, while Jude Law is performing it with gusto on Broadway. GSP will give audiences the experience of seeing this Shakespeare play for the first time, and with only 36 plays in the canon, that's remarkable already.
You Can't Always Get What You Want
The Two Noble Kinsmen is an adventure of implacable idealism. The plot focuses on four young lovers: soldier chums Palamon and Arcite jailed in Athens as valiant prisoners of war; Emilia, a beautiful Amazon who's sworn off men; and the Jailer's Daughter who's infatuation turns her from gleeful girl to madwoman. The lovers are rocked by Fate, yet still desperately cling to what they feel sure will provide happiness. The tragicomedy rises from their collisions with each other and with the sophisticated and silly characters they encounter in Athens: the duke Theseus, his Amazon bride Hippolyta and his right-hand Pirithous, the Jailer who keeps them, the Wooer who's thwarted, the Doctor who aims to cure madness with madness, and a koo-koo cavalcade of townies.
Why It's Controversial
The story of The Two Noble Kinsmen may be shocking, but more surprising is the general public's unfamiliarity with or bias against the text. In the nearly 400 years since it first appeared in print in 1634 without preface or dedication, the play has been overshadowed by objections and questions about the collaboration of its authors, Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Despite the controversial contradictions from act to act-from drama to romantic comedy to a study in madness and so on-the GSP finds that Shakespeare and Fletcher have given us a refreshingly realistic world where immediate changes are in play. Our masterful playwrights harness what might otherwise be a fatal flaw of collaboration, leading us to an enhanced and surprising ending where tragedy and comedy move and shake us at once-an experience more familiar to today's audiences than ever before.
And in case you were wondering where the story comes from, it's very straightforward...Here's how the Arden edition (Lois Potter, editor) introduces it [with some notes]:
"The Two Noble Kinsmen is a Jacobean dramatization of a medieval English tale [Chaucer's Knight's Tale] based on an Italian romance version [Boccaccio's] of a Latin epic about one of the oldest and most tragic Greek legends [wars between Oedipus' tyrant brother Creon and the enlightened Athenian Theseus in Thebes, with some Amazons in the mix]; it has two authors [the Bard and Fletcher] and two heroes [Palamon and Arcite, or, their love object Emilia and the poor Jailer's Daughter who falls in love with Palamon and loses her gourd]."
But most everyone knows that already.
GSP's Record So Far
The Guerrilla Shakespeare Project made a popular and critical splash with its New York debut in summer 2008 of JULIUS CAESAR, with a female Caesar playing on then-current presidential politics. A taut MEASURE FOR MEASURE followed in spring of 2009, creating a world where passion and punishment were bound together, corrupted and, eventually, untied. GSP's earlier productions of the comic TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, tragic RICHARD III, and contemporary THIS IS OUR YOUTH were presented in Rhode Island. With THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN, GSP now moves to the challenge and joy of the Shakespearean romance.
Founded in 2005 by actors in the Brown University/Trinity Rep graduate theatre program, the Guerrilla Shakespeare Project fosters a vibrant, passionate, visceral connection between actor and audience to make inventive and immediate American theatre from classical works. Struggling always for simplicity and precision, this gutsy young group promises to make the entertainment and beauty of Shakespeare accessible to all.
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