The Public Theater Announces Post-Show Discussions For LOVE’S LABOR’S LOST

The Public Theater (Artistic Director Oskar Eustis; Interim Executive Director Joey Parnes) will present post-show discussions following select performances of the Public Lab production, LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST, directed by Karin Coonrod. The Public Lab Thursday Night Speaker Series for LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST will be held following the Thursday, October 27 and Thursday, November 3 performances and consist of engaging conversations with notable panelists. Tickets are $15 for all performances of LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST and include free admission to the post-show discussions.

On Thursday, October 27, immediately following the 7:30 p.m. performance, a panel moderated by Barry Edelstein (Director of the Shakespeare Initiative) and featuring Karin Coonrod (Director of LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST); Richard McCoy (Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY and the author of numerous books and articles on Shakespeare and English history); and David Scott Kastan (Professor of English at Yale University and author of Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, Shakespeare after Theory, and Shakespeare and the Book) will focus on "Study Is Like The Heaven's Glorious Sun: A discussion of the history, themes, and language of LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST."

On Thursday, November 3, immediately following the 7:30 p.m. performance, a panel moderated by Nella Vera (Public Theater Director of Marketing) and featuring Laura Motta and Aileen McKenna (aka Lucky and The Mick, from the popular Craptacular blog, a blog about the state of theater in New York); Jane Berentson (author of the novel Miss Harper Can Do It); Michelle Beck (Katherine in LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST); and Nick Westrate (Berowne in LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST) will discuss "What Are The Kids Calling It These Days?," a panel on how young people in the 21st century communicate.

In LOVE'S LABOR'S LOST, The King of Navarre and his best buds swear off romance and withdraw into their studies...until some girls show up. As the young couples stumble their way toward love, the others in their circle - a pedantic school master, a Spanish dandy, a streetwise con-man, and a cop with a few screws loose - work through their own mad dilemmas. In the end, the real world intrudes and brings everyone back to earth, but not even a cold winter blast manages to chill the warmth of this beguiling play.

Now in its 5th season, Public Lab provides new opportunities for both our audiences and artists. Our audience gains access to more of the theater they love from The Public - both Shakespeare and new work - at the affordable price of only $15. Our artists, both emerging and established, gain a new platform to further develop their work on stage and in performance.

Speaker Series Bios

Michelle Beck recently appeared in As You Like It and The Tempest as part of The Bridge Project at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music. Her regional theater credits include Twelfth Night at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Tartuffe at the McCarter Theatre Center and Yale Rep, and The Winter's Tale and Cyrano de Bergerac at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

JANE BERENTSON grew up in Washington State and relocated to the East Cost in 2004. Her first novel, Miss Harper Can Do It, published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, chronicles the antics of a young elementary school teacher dealing with the deployment of a military boyfriend. Jane Berentson works as a full time high school Spanish teacher for the NYC public schools. She's also working on a second novel.

Karin Coonrod is a theater maker whose work has been seen and heard across the country and around the world. This year in New York she directed More Or Less I Am (drawn from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself") with Compagnia de' Colombari in different locations around New York City and Aphra Behn's The Rover at the World Financial Center. In Chicago she directed Romanian playwright Andras Visky's Juliet. She is Founding Director of acclaimed Arden Party Theater Company in downtown New York City 1987-1997 (during which time she won an Encore Award for her direction of Roger Vitrac's Victor Or Children Take Over) and its successor Compagnia de' Colombari, an international company which has performed the medieval mystery plays re-imagined for the 21st century, launching a new tradition of theater in Orvieto, Italy. Past credits include Henry VI (Public Theater); King John, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus (Theater for A New Audience); Everything That Rises Must Converge (from Flannery O'Connor's stories) at New York Theatre Workshop; Othello (Hartford Stage); Enrico IV (at ART in Cambridge). Ms. Coonrod is a lecturer at The Yale School of Drama and looks forward to directing Andras Visky's I Killed My Mother at La Mama in 2012 and Chuck Mee's The Perfect Wedding at The Hungarian Theatre of Cluj, Romania.

Barry Edelstein is in charge of The Public's Shakespeare Initiative, which oversees all Shakespeare production in Central Park and downtown--including the newly launched Mobile Unit tour to prisons, shelters, etc.--and which runs the Shakespeare Lab professional training program and The Public's Shakespeare-related education and outreach programs. For The Shakespeare Initiative, Edelstein has shepherded The Merchant of Venice (also Associate Producer of the Broadway transfer), The Winter's Tale, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and Othello. His directing credits for The Public Theater include Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice (1995), and WASP and Other Plays. Edelstein was the dramaturg for three seasons of Joseph Papp's "Shakespeare Marathon." He was the Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company from 1998-2003. He has staged many productions of Shakespeare and others in NYC and around the country. As an author, his credits include Thinking Shakespeare (2007), and Bardisms: Shakespeare for All Occasions (2009).
David Scott KASTAN is currently the George M. Bodman Professor of English at Yale University, having previously taught at Columbia as the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities and at Dartmouth College. He is among the most widely read of contemporary scholars: among his books are Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, Shakespeare after Theory, and Shakespeare and the Book. He has produced important scholarly editions of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part One, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus; and he edited the recent five volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. He currently serves as one of the general editors of the Arden Shakespeare, as co-editor of the Bantam Shakespeare, and as the series editor of the Barnes and Noble Shakespeare. He is currently completing a book on Shakespeare and religion, called A Will to Believe.

RICHARD MCCOY is Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of three books - Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (1979), The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (1989) and Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (2002) - as well as articles on Shakespeare's plays, including The Comedy of Errors, Henry V, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Huntington Library. He has also served as a panelist and consultant for Shakespeare performances at Theatre for a New Audience, Classic Stage Company, the Pearl Theater Company, Target Margin, and the Public as well as the Royal Shakespeare Company and Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival. His forthcoming book, Faith in Shakespeare, explores links between plays like The Winter's Tale that ask an audience to "awake your faith" and shifts in Reformation religious beliefs.

AILEEN MCKENNA is a new media marketing pro who designed her first website at the ripe-bold age of fourteen. She holds a degree in English and American Literature from New York University, and has done stints in both Financial and Professional Services marketing. Today she is the Creative Director at JCG New Media, a niche direct marketing firm, where she specializes in social media marketing and search engine optimization. She hails from a long line of Irish storytellers who appreciate the value of a well-timed dirty joke, which she celebrates every day writing for The Craptacular, where she is known as The Mick.

LAURA MOTTA is a writer and editor who began her career blogging -- before the word existed -- about her favorite band, Hanson. Since then, her writing has appeared everywhere from the inside flaps of bestsellers, to women's magazines, to the New York Times. She has held positions in digital media at NBC, EverydayHealth, and Travelzoo, and is currently a content director at Shermans Travel Media. In 2010, along with her friend Aileen McKenna, she co-founded The Craptacular, a completely badass blog about Broadway. She holds a journalism degree from Emerson College.

NELLA VERA is the Director of Marketing at The Public Theater where she oversees marketing, advertising, sales, audience development and new media for five theaters in the Public's downtown space, as well as Shakespeare in the Park. Previously, she was the Associate Director of Marketing at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles and managed marketing and promotions for CTG's three stages. Other experience includes Director of Marketing at New York's award-winning Signature Theatre Company for three seasons, Associate Producer of The Flea Theater in Tribeca and Director of Planning and Projects at Manhattan Theater Club. Nella also worked at Broadway's very first full service marketing firm, FourFront Press & Marketing, where her clients included Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk, On the Town, Chicago, John Leguizamo's Freak, Disney's Beauty and the Beast & The Lion King and others. Nella is a proud graduate of Georgetown University and received her MFA from Columbia University.

Nick Westrate has appeared on Broadway in A Moon for the Misbegotten. Off-Broadway he performed in The Little Foxes at New York Theatre Workshop. His television credits include a role in the recent HBO mini-series "MildrEd Pierce."

The Public Theater (Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director; Joey Parnes, Interim Executive Director) was founded by Joseph Papp in 1954 and is now one of the nation's preeminent cultural institutions, producing new plays, musicals and productions of classics at its downtown home and at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The Public Theater's mandate to create a theater for all New Yorkers continues to this day on stage and through extensive outreach and education programs. Each year, more than 250,000 people attend Public Theater-related productions and events at six downtown stages, including Joe's Pub, and Shakespeare in the Park. The Public Theater's productions have won 42 Tony Awards, 151 Obies, 41 Drama Desk Awards and four Pulitzer Prizes. Fifty-four Public Theater Productions have moved to Broadway, including Sticks and Bones; That Championship Season; A Chorus Line; For Colored Girls...; The Pirates of Penzance; The Tempest; Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk; The Ride Down Mt. Morgan; Topdog/Underdog; Take Me Out; Caroline, or Change; Passing Strange; the revival of HAIR; Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Merchant of Venice. www.publictheater.org.

Photo Credit:  Joseph Moran

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