John Douglas Thompson and Sarin Monae West Join THE REVENGE at Red Bull Theater

RED BULL THEATER has revealed the updated cast for the next offering of the new season of OBIE Award-winning Revelation Readings: The Revenge by Edward Young, directed by Nathan Winkelstein. This event will premiere live in-person at The Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 West 42nd Street) and simulcast online on Monday January 22nd at 7:30pm. To purchase tickets for the in-person presentation, the online simulcast or subsequent viewing, go to https://www.redbulltheater.com/the-revenge.

John Douglas Thompson (upcoming: Red Bull Theater’s Antony & Cleopatra with Audra McDonald; previously for Red Bull: Women Beware Women; Tony Award nomination - Jitney, two Drama Desk Awards, two Obie Awards, Outer Critics Circle Award, Lucille Lortel Award) andSarin Monae West (soon to be seen in the title role of Red Bull Theater's Medea: Re-Versed; Mint Theater’s The Rat Trap; The Skin of Our Teeth - LCT/Broadway; Merry Wives - Shakespeare in the Park; Mia MIA at La MaMa) will join the previously announced. Christian Coulson (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; “Mozart in the Jungle;” Red Bull Theater’s The Changeling; A Picture of Autumn - Mint Theater);  Merritt Janson (Red Bull Theater’s Coriolanus; Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Tamburlaine, Notes From Underground - Theatre for a New Audience);  Ismenia Mendes (Red Bull Theater’s Mac Beth; “Orange Is the New Black;” Marys Seacole - LCT3; The Liar - CSC;  Cressida in Troilus & Cressida - NYSF); and Matthew Rauch (Red Bull Theater’s  The Duchess of Malfi - Actors Equity Award/Joe A. Callaway Award, The Revenger's Tragedy, Edward II; Broadway: The Great Society, Junk, The Merchant of Venice, Prelude to a Kiss; TV: “Partner Track” - Netflix; “Banshee” - Cinemax; “Blue Bloods”). West replaces the previously announced Alexandra Silber.

This event will premiere live in-person from the Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 West 42nd Street) on Monday January 22nd at 7:30 PM ET. The recording will be available from until 11:59 PM ET on Sunday January 28. Open Captions will be available on Wednesday January 23 (7:30 PM ET) until 11:59 PM ET on Sunday January 28. This reading is presented in partnership with the Mellon Foundation sponsored “On Decolonizing Theatre” Seminar at Northwestern University, and the R/18 Collective.

"Young’s explosive tragedy had an inauspicious debut: one documented performance at the royal patent theatre, Drury Lane, on April 18, 1721. The first recorded revival in 1732 was advertised as a performance 'at the particular Desire of several Persons of Quality. Not Acted these Ten years.' Apparently, aristocrats had a particular taste for The Revenge, relying on print editions to keep the play alive in private reading and performance until it could be brought before the broader public for another trial. In the 1740s, the star James Quin added it to his repertoire. For the next hundred years, the play survived as an object of 'particular desire' of a succession of actors: Henry Mossop, John Kemble, and Edmund Kean among them. These English men took star turns in the blacked-up role of Zanga, a Moor of royal birth, who is unable to conquer his captor, Don Alonzo of Spain and so plants the poisonous idea that the Spaniard’s new bride and best friend have cuckolded him. In Zanga’s closing address, he stands over Alonzo, celebrating the Spaniard’s suicide but lamenting that victory through intrigue has proven ignoble and unsatisfying. In 1805, an adolescent Lord Byron delivered this speech at Harrow School—perhaps as a kiss-off to faculty who had insulted him by calling him a blackguard. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Ira Aldridge, the Black New Yorker who made his career in England and throughout Europe transformed the role into an Abolitionist vehicle in full-scale productions and in solo recitals. Aldridge surely emphasized Zanga’s grievances: Don Alonzo’s murder of his father, the Spanish massacre of 10,000 Moors in battle, and one humiliating slap that cemented Zanga’s abject status," said Miles Grier, Associate Professor - City University of NY. For more, visit www.redbulltheater.com/the-revenge.


Revelation Readings offer the unique opportunity to hear rarely-produced classic plays, and brand new plays in conversation with the classics, performed by the finest actors in New York. This year’s slate of readings is sure to delight audiences all season long.  

Future Revelation Readings will take place online and in-person at various venues around NYC, and will include: 

Monday February 19th at 7:30pm - Online & In Person at Florence Gould Hall at FIAF

THE IMAGINARY INVALID by Molière, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher, directed by Jesse Berger

Featuring Jordan Boatman, Will Brill, Arnie Burton, Kelley Curran, Mark Linn-Baker, Lorenzo Pisoni, John Yi, and more to be announced

In partnership with the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF)

In Molière’s best loved comedy, Monsieur Argan is a notorious hypochondriac whose nonexistent illnesses blind him to the con men and women (his new wife) who prey on his fears to fatten their purses. His plan: marry his daughter to a doctor so he'll have free round-the-clock on-site healthcare for the rest of his life. Newly translated by Mirabelle Ordinaire and adapted for Red Bull by Jeffrey Hatcher (The Government Inspector, The Alchemist), The Imaginary Invalid is a brilliant satire of doctors, lawyers, and would-be patients who take self-care to staggering levels of pathological solipsism.  A comic whirlwind of pills, lovers, therapies, disguises, vaccinations, impersonations, masks, mindfulness and miracle cures. 

Monday March 25th at 7:30pm - In Person at the Lucille Lortel Theatre

ANTONY & CLEOPATRA by William Shakespeare, directed by Arin Arbus

Featuring  Audra McDonald, John Douglas Thompson, Dakin Matthews and Isabel Arraiza, and more to be announced

Presented in association with The Acting Company

In  this classic Jacobean tragedy of love and duty, Cleopatra the Egyptian Queen, and the Roman general Marc Antony scandalize Egypt and Rome alike through their passionate love affair, setting off a chain of broken alliances, jealous rages and civil war that reverberate through the known world in one of Shakespeare’s greatest historical love stories.

Monday April 15th -  In Person at Sheen Center Shiner Theatre

HOW SHAKESPEARE SAVED MY LIFE

An epic poem told by Jacob Ming-Trent with verse rhyme and song

Jacob tells us how Shakespeare raised him, saved him and ultimately showed him that forgiveness and mercy could set him free. "America tried to take my life, a five-hundred-year-old white dude saved it."

April 20th & 21st - In Person at Sheen Center Shiner Theatre

MACBETH by William Shakespeare, directed by Nathan Winkelstein

Featuring Chukwudi Iwuji, and more to be announced 

One of the most malevolently attractive plays of all time, Macbeth is often held up as the greatest dramatic example of the fatal flaw of ambition. But what if ambition were not the driving force behind the actions of the Macbeths? This workshop seeks to delve deeper into the core of the Macbeths' relationship - a relationship full of passion, evil, grief, and ultimately tragedy. And also there are some pretty weird sisters hanging around…what are they all about? Join us on a journey of exploration into the most Jacobean of all Shakespeare’s plays. 

Tuesday April 23rd at 7:30pm – In Person at Sheen Center Shiner Theatre

GOD’S SPIES by Bill Cain, directed by Nathan Winkelstein

World Premiere!
Cast to be announced

What do you write after you have written the world’s greatest play? Hopefully, not another Timon of Athens. Fortunately for Shakespeare, he is caught in the middle of the pandemic of 1603 and theaters are closed for a year. The plague opens his eyes to the mysteries of life and death when he is quarantined with a young Puritan lawyer and a mature streetwise prostitute. Will Shakespeare thrive creatively? Will his follow up play be as disappointing as his last? Or will he write his masterpiece?

Friday April 26th & Saturday April 27th –  In Person at Sheen Center Shiner Theatre

THE ROVER by Aphra Behn, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch

Featuring Santino Fontana, and more to be announced

It's Spain, during carnival, and anything can and does happen. Two Spanish sisters don masks and take to the streets, one to reunite with her true love, the other to find a man and evade her fate at the nunnery. Enter a trio of English rakes looking for kicks, and we get raucous and raunchy Restoration comedy at its best. From the pen of the first professional female playwright comes a play that challenges 17th-century notions of marriage, while asking timeless questions of sexual politics. How far will women go, to follow their hearts' desire? And just how badly can men behave, before they have to put a ring on it? 

Monday April 29th at 7:30pm – In Person at The Loreto Theater at Sheen Center

THE TEMPEST by William Shakespeare, directed by Jesse Berger

Featuring songs by Academy Award-winner Elliot Goldenthal created for Julie Taymor's The Tempest, with additional music & musical direction by Greg Pliska

Featuring Patrick Page, Reeve Carney, Lily Santiago, Myra Lucretia Taylor, Raphael Nash Thompson, and more to be announced

A shipwreck, a magical island, and a tale of love, revenge, and inheritance frame Shakespeare’s final, and one of his most beloved plays. Prospero, the unjustly deposed Duke of Milan, holds sway over the island home of his exile through command of the magical arts, raising his daughter Miranda in isolation save for the island’s creatures and spirits, until a storm washes ashore a cadre of visitors whose arrival portends danger, romance, and reconciliation.

Monday May  6th at 7:30pm – In Person at Sheen Center Shiner Theatre

OR, WHAT SHE WILL by Liz Duffy Adams, Directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch

Featuring Rebecca Hall, and more to be announced

Sprung from debtors’ prison after a disastrous overseas mission, Aphra is desperate to get out of the spy trade. She has a shot at a production at one of only two London companies, if she can only finish her play by morning despite interruptions from sudden new love, actress Nell Gwynne; complicated royal love, King Charles II; and very dodgy ex-love, double-agent William Scott—who may be in on a plot to murder the king in the morning. Can Aphra Behn – poet, spy, and soon to be  first professional female playwright — save Charles’ life, win William a pardon, resist Nell’s charms, and launch her career, all in one night? 

Friday May 10th & Saturday May 11th –  In Person at Sheen Center Shiner Theatre

TITUS ANDRONICUS by William Shakespeare, directed by Jesse Berger

Featuring Patrick Page, and more to be announced

One of Shakespeare's earliest and bloodiest plays explores the desperate nihilism of a world where an unstoppable cycle of revenge has begun. Titus is Rome's greatest general and the head of a noble Roman family. When his armies vanquish the Goths, their defeated queen, Tamora - with her paramour Aaron the Moor - unleashes a fury that brings Rome, Titus, and his family to their knees. The play's exploration of humanity's capacity for inhumanity is shockingly contemporary.

Monday May 13th –  In Person at Sheen Center Shiner Theatre

ANOTHER MEDEA written & directed by Aaron Mark

Featuring Tom Hewitt

At once ancient and contemporary, this provocative mono-thriller is Grand Guignol horror in the style of Spalding Gray. The story of the incarcerated Marcus Sharp, a charismatic and enigmatic New York actor who recounts in gruesome detail how his obsessions with a wealthy doctor named Jason and the myth of Medea lead to horrific, unspeakable events. “Played with great suppleness by the handsome, silver-haired Broadway veteran Tom Hewitt, Marcus is a disarming psychopath....in this darkening tale, we watch his life unravel...some unnerving moments...This play is partly about loving the theater: the story of a man who loses his way after he exiles himself from the stage.” - New York Times

ABOUT Edward Young

The son of a clergyman, Edward Young was born near Winchester, England in 1683. He attended Oxford University, where he honed his literary skills In the 1710s, he published a handful of poems seeking to obtain patronage from aristocrats and even the monarchy. After achieving his doctorate in canon law in 1719, he turned to drama and a new patron, the Duke of Wharton. Busiris, King of Egypt (1719) was successful enough that Drury Lane theatre committed to his next play, The Revenge (1721), which closed after a night. The insolvent Wharton’s promised donations came in below promised levels and income from plays proved insufficient. Young eventually obtained an appointment as a royal chaplain and published what was then a celebrated long poem, “Night-Thoughts,” published in installments from 1742 to 1745. The elegiac poem made him famous and earned translations in eleven other languages. Nevertheless, Zanga of The Revenge remains his best-known invention today. The dramatist and theatre critic Elizabeth Inchbald claims that, in Zanga, Young “surpassed the genius of Shakspeare [sic]—but immorally so—he has adorned malice and its kindred vices with a sentiment appropriate to the rarest virtue—scrupulous regard for unblemished honour.”

ABOUT Nathan Winkelstein

Nathan Winkelstein has been with Red Bull Theater for eight years, and Associate Artistic Director for three. He is the Producing Director of the Revelation Reading series as well as the host of Red Bull Theater Podcast, the Director of education and the casting associate for Red Bull. Nathan has acted or directed for numerous companies around the country, including The Alley, NYU Grad, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Shakespeare Theater Company, LCT, The Folger, American Shakespeare Center and others. Dubbed 'The Pied Piper of Shakespeare' Nathan provides private acting coaching to select clients and has taught for Red Bull, STC, LCT, TGS and Maggie Flanagan Studio. Nathan received his BA in Theater from the University at Buffalo and his MFA in Classical Acting from the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in the UK. Nathan is a proud member of Actors Equity.

ABOUT Northwestern University’s “ON DECOLONIZING THEATRE” SEMINAR

Funded by a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, the Northwestern multi-disciplinary project “On Decolonizing Theatre” features a series of events and curricular offerings during the 2023-2024 academic year on the theme of how performers and theater directors have been grappling with issues relating to colonialism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and misogyny in theatrical works from the late 17th through the early 19th century, including plays, operas, and ballets.

ABOUT THE R/18 COLLECTIVE

The R/18 Collective was formed in 2019 to promote professional productions of plays drawn from the Restoration and eighteenth-century repertoire and to support performance research related to those productions. Composed of scholars from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada, the Collective seeks both to cultivate strong, reciprocal relationships between scholars and theater artists and to increase awareness among theater audiences of the great riches embedded in dramatic works from this era. The R/18 Collective believe these plays provide urgently-needed insights into the formation of the modern world, including the historical development of our current ideas about race, gender, sexuality, nation, and capital. The R/18 Collective is committed to providing the dramaturgical knowledge and services of some of the world's top scholars in the field to theater companies interested in producing these works as well as to securing collaborative, international grants to support those productions and the related performance research.

ABOUT RED BULL THEATER

Red Bull Theater brings rarely seen classic plays to dynamic new life for contemporary audiences, uniting a respect for tradition with a modern sensibility. Named for the rowdy Jacobean playhouse that illegally performed plays in England during the years of Puritan rule, Red Bull Theater is New York City’s home for dynamic performances of great plays that stand the test of time. With the Jacobean plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as its cornerstone, the company also produces new works that are in conversation with the classics. A home for artists, scholars, and students, Red Bull Theater delights and engages the intellect and imagination of audiences, and strives to make its work accessible, diverse, and welcoming to all. We value and practice inclusiveness, equity, and diversity in all of our activities, and are committed to antiracist action. Red Bull Theater believes in the power of great classic stories and plays of heightened language to deepen our understanding of the human condition, in the special ability of live theater to create unique, collective experiences, and in the timeless capacity of classical theater to illuminate the events of our times. Variety agreed, hailing Red Bull’s work as: “Proof that classical theater can still be surprising after hundreds of years.”

Since its debut in 2003 with a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles starring Daniel Breaker, Red Bull Theater has served adventurous theatergoers with Off-Broadway productions, Revelation Readings, and the annual Short New Play Festival. The company also offers outreach programs including Shakespeare in Schools bringing professional actors and teaching artists into public school classrooms; Bull Sessions, free post-play discussions with top scholars; and Classical Acting Intensives led by veteran theater professionals. During the pandemic, Red Bull created several new and ongoing programs to serve audiences and artists with our mission: the Red Bull Theater Podcast, Online Readings, Seminars, and more.

Red Bull Theater has produced 24 Off-Broadway productions and over 200 Revelation Readings of rarely seen classics, serving a community of more than 5,000 artists and providing quality artistic programming to an audience of over 65,000. The company’s unique programming has received ongoing critical acclaim and has been recognized with Lortel, Drama Desk, Drama League, Callaway, Off-Broadway Alliance, and OBIE nominations and Awards.
 

For more information about the Revelation Readings, or any of Red Bull Theater's programs, visit www.redbulltheater.com.

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