Brave New World Repertory Theatre Announces Annual Festival SHAKESPEARE ON STRATFORD

Brooklyn's Brave New World Repertory Theatre has announced its annual festival Shakespeare on Stratford, a live FREE family-friendly community celebration in honor of Shakespeare's birthday on Saturday, April 23 from 2-4pm. In a h/t to Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford Upon Avon, the celebration is set to take place outdoors on Brooklyn's Stratford Road in Ditmas Park-Flatbush.

The multi-faceted Shakespeare on Stratford will provide four 20-minute showtimes for up to 200 people at a time and include Shakespeare's Sonnets performed on 6 Victorian porches, a Madrigal singalong, and a Haitian dance finale all in celebration of spring. Masks are encouraged but spectators are free to wander from porch to porch.

Festivities are set for Stratford Road (between Matthews Court and Lewis Place) with 11 costumed performers reciting, singing, dancing. "April is poetry month" says Claire Beckman, BNW's producing artistic director who created Shakespeare on Stratford. "And Stratford Road is in full bloom the week of Shakespeare's birth! Cherry blossoms, hyacinth and tulips scent the air, the Victorian homes and costumed actors match in the same pastel colors. The drumbeats with the rhythms of Haitian dance in honor of the large Haitian population in Flatbush. It's a feast for senses."

Brave New World's Shakespeare on Stratford festival will take place one block from their longtime headquarters in Ditmas Park, a tree- and porch-lined neighborhood that floods with pink cherry blossoms, tulips and daffodils every Spring. The event will take place in light rain or shine. In the event of heavy showers, the rain date is Sunday, April 24 at 2pm. Details/updates at bravenewworldrep.org

Co-directors of Shakespeare on Stratford: Beckman directing the 10 sonnets, performed by BNW Rep's professional actors; Nancy Shankman, Director of NYU Steinhardt's Adult Chorus and former director of the NYU Modern Madrigal Singers, directing madrigals; and Sheila Anozier, a Haitian American multidisciplinary artist currently on faculty at the Mark Morris Dance Center, directing the dance.

Performance Details:

Brave New World Rep Presents

SHAKESPEARE ON STRATFORD Spring Festival

LIVE, Saturday, April 23, 2pm-4pm

FREE ADMISSION; Reservations required (here)

Outdoors on Stratford Road between Matthews Court + Lewis Place

Ditmas Park, Brooklyn

Transportation: Q to Beverley Road

Creative Team:

Claire Beckman: Co Director/Sonnets and Curator; Sheila Anozier: Co-Director/Choreography; Nancy Shankman: Co-Director/Music Director of Madrigals; Brittani Beresford: Costume Designer

About Brave New World Repertory Theatre:

For the past 19 years, Brooklyn's Brave New World Rep has carved out a site-specific niche presenting re-envisioned classics and works by Brooklyn playwrights. Recent work includes free performances of Elmer Rice's Street Scene, where the company closed off a street in Park Slope, using a tenement building and adjacent street as the stage; Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge (2018) on the Waterfront Barge Museum in Red Hook; and The Plantation, a bold new adaptation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, a post-Civil War story set after emancipation but before the onset of Jim Crow. The immersive production was performed in The Commanding Officer's House on Governors Island in 2017.

Brave New World Rep has earned a reputation of delivering unexpectedly immersive works to communities all around Brooklyn, beginning with its 2005 production of To Kill a Mockingbird, presented on the front porches and sidewalks of a tree lined Ditmas Park street.

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