Hamish Linklater and Lily Rabe to Lead Red Bull's THE DUTCH COURTESAN Reading Next Week

Red Bull Theater's next Revelation Reading, John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, directed by Michael Sexton, featuring Hamish Linklater and Lily Rabe, along with Matthew Amendt, Michael Braun, Lucas Caleb Rooney, Autumn Dornfeld, Cameron Folmar, Don Guillory, Daniel K. Isaac, David Manis, Kathryn Meisle, Rachel Mewbron, Steven Rattazzi, Kate Skinner, and more, will take place March 2nd at 7:30 pm at the Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street.

Why is it so hard to be good? Freevill tries to break off his affair with the titular courtesan - but she's not so easy to shake. The first play by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries to have been revived by Laurence Olivier's National Theatre company in the 1960s, John Marston's plays are the ones that Shakespeare made fun of in Hamlet's famous "Advice to the Players." But what fun they are!

When the play was first published in 1605, it was prefaced by a summary: "The difference betwixt the love of a courtesan and a wife is the full scope of the play, which intermixed with the deceits of a witty city jester, fills up the comedy." Freevil, an easy-going, pleasure-seeking man about town, discards his dutch concubine Franceschina, and, for a lark, sets Malheureux, his unhappy puritanical friend, on to her. But when passion is a scourge and love is humiliation, friends very quickly become dangerous enemies.

Like many of Marston's plays, The Dutch Courtesan (ca. 1604) challenges generic boundaries, marrying revenge tragedy with city comedy to form a darkly satiric urban tragicomedy. The play centers on two friends, the morose Malheureux and the sanguine Freevill. Freevill enjoys the affections of both the alluring Franceschina (the courtesan of the play's title), and the gentle, chaste Beatrice, to whom he is betrothed. Resolving to break off from vice before marrying, he offers his courtesan to Malheureux, who is appalled to find himself violently possessed by lust despite his moral objections to a woman described as "an arrant strumpet." While Malheureux overcomes his scruples, Franceschina is not complacent about being abandoned by one man and transferred to another. In a riposte to Dekker and Middleton's Honest Whore, the beautiful courtesan flouts expectations not by being paradoxically honest, but by proving even more dangerously immoral than imagined. Her response to Freevill's wedding plans prompts a series of elaborate plots and counterplots, whose rapid switchbacks offer surprises for their audiences both onstage and off. Two subplots, meanwhile, introduce more overtly comic motifs borrowed from other popular early modern plays. The mischievous wit Cocledemoy takes delight in repeatedly tricking and robbing the outraged Master Mulligrub, echoing the mercenary exploits typical of city comedies by Jonson and Middleton. And while Beatrice prepares for marriage, her sister Crispinella criticizes the institution in spiky banter with the gallant Tysefew, recalling Much Ado's Beatrice and Benedick. Other threads similarly showcase Marston's interest in recent theatrical fashions: Freevill's concealed spying nods to the disguised ruler plot familiar from plays including Measure for Measure (ca. 1603-4) and Marston's earlierThe Malcontent (1601-03), while Malheureux's tortured philosophical reflections echo from Hamlet (ca. 1600-01) as well as Montaigne. Yet if Marston highlights the play's debts to its broader theatrical community, the play is distinctive in its depiction of sexual voracity and often gratuitous aggression: features that are especially disconcerting when we remember that its bawdy and murderous characters were acted entirely by children. With its swaggering language, colorful curses, and wild plot twists, The Dutch Courtesan is both of its time and ahead of it.

John Marston (1576-1634) brought to his writings an elite education, a sardonic wit, and a taste for sexually explicit banter. An Oxford graduate and member of Middle Temple of the Inns of Court, he made his mark first with nondramatic poetry - the pornographic Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image and the satiric Scourge of Villainy - before turning to plays after the 1599 Bishops' Ban on verse satire. Marston wrote primarily for the boys' companies, especially the edgy, sophisticated Children of the Queens Revels. Both writer and shareholder in the company, he had an important role in developing the dark, experimental wit that came to distinguish their upmarket Blackfriars Theater from the more inclusive open-air amphitheaters like the Globe. Like many of his characters, he had an antagonistic streak. He has been credited with sparking the feud known as the war of the theaters, and he and Ben Jonson notoriously attacked each other both onstage and off; at one point Jonson claimed to have physically beaten him and taken his pistol. Yet Marston also praised Jonson in print, and worked collaboratively with him and George Chapman on the 1605 comedy Eastward Ho, which got all its authors except Marston in prison for libel. The near escape didn't stop him from continuing to court controversy; in 1608 James I had Marston imprisoned after further theatrical scandals and offenses. Around this time, Marston retired from writing for the theater, and surprised his contemporaries by spending the rest of his life as a priest. With its unpredictable mix of competition, friendship, aggression, and reflectiveness, his life - like his writings - embraced contraries.

In addition to the upcoming Off-Broadway mainstage production of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Red Bull's Eleventh Season features an ongoing series of OBIE Award-winning Revelation Readings (Monday evenings at 7:30pm), presenting staged readings of new and rarely performed classic plays from all eras and cultures.

Upcoming Readings:

· March 9 - John Ford's Perkin Warbeck - Directed by Carl Forsman with Brian D'Arcy James at Lucille Lortel Theatre;

· May 4 - John Ford's Love's Sacrifice - Directed by Craig Baldwin with Tina Benko and Christopher Innvar at Playwrights Horizons;

· June 29 - Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal - with Charles Busch and Everett Quinton at Lucille Lortel Theatre *The second of two Ridiculous collaborations with Busch and Quinton this season.

Tickets for Revelation Readings are $42 with Premium Seats available at $64. Become a Member and get them for only $25! (For complete list of Readings and updated cast information, visit www.redbulltheater.com). All artists subject to change.

This season's mainstage production, John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's A Whore, directed by Berger, will begin a limited engagement April 14th at The Duke on 42nd Street. Opening Night is set for Sunday April 26th. What if Romeo and Juliet were brother and sister? Find out in this daring and provocative thriller. Red Bull Theater returns to its roots with the bloodiest and sexiest of all Jacobean tragedies. This heart-pounding tale of love, lust and hypocrisy is a deliciously perverse romantic tragedy. Siblings Annabella and Giovanni fall into an incestuous affair with a brutal velocity that sets Renaissance Parma aflame with its passionate force. Defiant in their desires to the bloody end, these lovers take "star-crossed" into a whole new galaxy. This crown jewel of Jacobean drama has scandalized and enthralled audiences for four centuries with its singular journey through the fires of desire. In its first major Off-Broadway production in 20 years, this rollicking ride will have your moral compass spinning wildly. Single tickets for 'Tis Pity She's a Whore go on sale January 5th for $62, with Premium Seats available at $84 at www.redbulltheater.com or at (212) 352-3101.

Red Bull Theater, hailed as "the city's gutsiest classical theater" byTime Out New York, is the not-profit Off-Broadway theater company specializing in plays of heightened language. With the Jacobean plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as its cornerstone, Red Bull Theater embraces the imagination of theatergoers through intimate, imaginative productions of great classic stories from all eras and cultures. Red BullTheater's eleventh season builds upon their unique history and mission to present vital and imaginative renderings of heightened language plays from all eras and cultures as they launch a second decade of sharing great classic stories.

Acclaimed as "a dynamic producer of classic plays" by The New York Times, Red Bull Theater has previously staged productions of Shakespeare's Pericles, the anonymous Revenger's Tragedy, Marlowe's Edward the Second, Middleton's Women Beware Women, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, the Off-Broadway premiere of Dekker, Ford & Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton, a major Off-Broadway revival of Jean Genet's The Maids, a new version of Strindberg's The Dance of Death by Mike Poulton, rare New York revivals of Loot and The Mystery of Irma Vep, and the first Off-Broadway revival of Volpone in over 50 years. The company's work has been hailed over the years as "the most exciting classical theater in New York" (Time Out New York), "Dynamite! (The New York Times), "the city's gutsiest classical theater" (Time Out New York), "Triumphant" (Associated Press), and "Proof that classical theater can still be surprising after hundreds of years" (Variety), among others.

Red Bull Theater's work has been recognized with multiple Callaway, Drama League, Lucille Lortel, and OBIE Award nominations and Awards. The company has staged over 125 readings through its ongoing OBIE Award-winning Revelation Readings, named by the Village Voice "Best Play Reading Series," and has developed new plays of heightened language and classical adaptations through its In-the-Raw workshop series. RedBull Theater reaches out to NYC students of all ages through "Direct Address" education programs teaching Shakespeare in middle schools and student matinees. Post-play "Bull Session" discussions with scholars following selected Sundaymatinees and Readings are free and open to the public.

Red Bull Theater offers Master Classes, Classical Acting Intensives and Workshops throughout the year and taught by top working professionals including Kathleen Chalfant, John Douglas Thompson, Olympia Dukakis, Heidi Griffiths, and Patrick Page, Red Bull Theater's intensives and workshops cover a variety of disciplines, including auditioning, text, voice, movement, clowning, stage combat, and acting Shakespeare. Classes are open to adults at all levels of training or experience. They range from one to six days with limited class sizes to allow one-on-one attention. You can enroll in any combination of classes, or take the whole series for a yearlong master training experience. Visit www.redbulltheater.com for complete details.

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