The Public Theater Announces Spring 2018 Line-up For Public Shakespeare Initiative Humanities Events

The Public Theater (Artistic Director, Oskar Eustis; Executive Director, Patrick Willingham) has announced the Spring 2018 PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE INITIATIVE line-up of special evenings exploring the ideas and themes of some of Shakespeare's most challenging and essential works. Highlights of this programming include a look at the "outsiders within" Othelloand The Merchant of Venice with Stephen Greenblatt and Kwame Anthony Appiah; sneak peeks of Robert O'Hara's Mobile Unit production of Henry V and the Shakespeare Works artist development program; a discussion about the production history of Othello and putting it on stage for today's contemporary audience with James Shapiro and Ayanna Thompson; and special invited performances of As You Like It by the Hunts Point Children's Shakespeare Ensemble.

Public Theater Partner, Supporter, and Member tickets for the Spring 2018 PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE INITIATIVE season will be available on Thursday, January 25. Single tickets, starting at $20, will be available on Saturday, January 27 by calling (212) 967-7555, visiting www.publictheater.org, or in person at the Taub Box Office at The Public Theater at 425 Lafayette Street. Tickets for Public Shakespeare Presents: Speak of Me As I Am: Othello on Stage will be available at a later date.

In September 2017, The Public Theater and The Shakespeare Society partnered together in their long-shared belief that Shakespeare is for everyone to launch the PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE INITIATIVE. For 20 years, The Shakespeare Society had realized this conviction through events combining commentary on and performances from Shakespeare's works; educational programs for the children of New York City; and artist development programs with theater professionals. At The Public, their programs have found a new home, as the PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE INITIATIVE producing and presenting events and programs as multidimensional as the community of Shakespeare-lovers it serves.

Under the leadership of Public Shakespeare Initiative Director Michael Sexton, the PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE INITIATIVE's wide range of programming includes larger Public Shakespeare Presents evenings, blending incisive commentary by scholars and other thinkers with compelling live performances by artists of all disciplines; intimate Public Shakespeare Talks, giving audiences unique insight into the artistic and intellectual processes of leading Shakespeare practitioners working in the theater; Artist Development Programs, to cultivate some of the most visionary artistic minds working on Shakespeare today; and Education Programs, specifically the Hunts Point Children's Shakespeare Ensemble which The Shakespeare Society co-founded with the Hunts Point Alliance for Children over a decade ago and which has offered hundreds of elementary and middle school students the opportunity to develop their confidence, knowledge, and creativity through the transformative experience of bringing Shakespeare's words to life onstage in the 10 Shakespeare productions the Ensemble has presented.

The Spring season will kick off with Public Shakespeare Presents: THE OUTSIDERS WITHIN: SHYLOCK, OTHELLO, AND SHAKESPEARE'S STRANGERS onThursday, March 8 at 7:00 p.m. in The Public's Anspacher Theater. Through rich language, complex characters, and the unique power of live theater to make it all real, Shakespeare's plays challenge audiences to confront and dismantle the mental barriers to understanding that too often divide us. Through the lens of two of Shakespeare's most controversial and exacting plays, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, distinguished Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and philosopherKwame Anthony Appiah will discuss Shakespeare's enduring power, and the challenges of living in a multiethnic, multi-faith society, in Shakespeare's time and our own. What happens when an outsider attains a position of power and influence on the inside? When society must wrestle with what it means to take seriously the cosmopolitan and Christian values of equality and mercy?

The season continues on Monday, March 19 at 7:00 p.m. with Public Shakespeare Talks: HENRY V IN PROGRESS, an inside look at the Mobile Unit's Henry V in LuEsther Hall. In Henry V, a once rowdy young prince becomes a man and a king, testing his mettle on the muddy battlefields of Northern France. Two weeks into rehearsal, award-winning playwright and directorRobert O'Hara will join The Public's Director of Special Artistic Projects Stephanie Ybarra, and members of the acclaimed Mobile Unit's Henry V cast for a look at the challenges and rewards of bringing "this star of England" to life on the Mobile stage.

On Monday, April 23 at 7:00 p.m., the Public Shakespeare Initiative will present Public Shakespeare Talks: SHAKESPEARE WORKS, a panel discussion with readings in the Martinson Theater. The Public Shakespeare Initiative opens up its Shakespeare Works artist development program to audiences with a panel discussion featuring actors, directors, scholars, and other special guests who have recently participated in a one-week residency through the program. Residencies provide participants with study materials, rehearsal space, and access to academic, artistic, and voice and text advisors as the group delves deeply into a single Shakespeare text. The experience is designed to give participants the opportunity to learn, experiment, and explore Shakespeare's plays free from the pressures and constraints of production. Past participants have included Elizabeth Marvel, John Douglas Thompson, Rebecca Taichman, and Sam Gold.

In anticipation of this summer's Shakespeare in the Park production of Othello at the Delacorte, the Public Shakespeare Initiative will next explore how the play's almost unbearable emotional power is entangled for any audience-both Shakespeare's and our own-with the sometimes intractable social and historical questions of race, religion, gender and more. In Public Shakespeare Presents: SPEAK OF ME AS I AM: OTHELLO ON STAGE on Monday, May 14 at 7:00 p.m., a lively, in-depth discussion with selected readings from the play by a panel of scholars and artists will grapple with the fraught heart and history of this deeply challenging, astonishing and enduring work. Has its troubled production history rendered it unplayable-or indeed, unwatchable-for a contemporary audience? Or is the play more moving, more disturbing, and more essential than ever? Panelists will include Columbia's James Shapiro, George Washington University's Ayanna Thompson and the director of this summer's Delacorte production, Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

On Friday, May 18 and Sunday, May 20 at 6:00 p.m., The Hunts Point Children's Shakespeare Ensemble will celebrate its eleventh year-and it's first season under the aegis of The Public Theater, in close partnership with the Hunts Point Alliance for Children - with two invited performances of the popular pastoral comedy AS YOU LIKE IT as the Bronx Academy for Multi Media in Hunts Point and New York Live Arts in Manhattan. "The uses of adversity" are indeed sweet in this beloved play that explores the warmth of friendship, the pain of exile, man's inhumanity to man, and how we can be healed by engaging with our community and the natural world. The performance marks the culmination of a year of study and rehearsal by the fifty fourth, fifth, and sixth graders participating in the Ensemble program, which is offered by the Public Shakespeare Initiative in collaboration with its vital community partner, the Hunts Point Alliance for Children, which co-founded the Ensemble with The Shakespeare Society in 2007.

Support for the collaboration of The Shakespeare Society and Public Theater provided by the New York Merger, Acquisition, and Collaboration Fund.

The New York Merger, Acquisition, and Collaboration Fund (NYMAC) encourages and supports mergers, acquisitions, joint-ventures, and other types of formal, long-term collaborations between nonprofits in New York City. NYMAC's funders include Altman Foundation, The Booth Ferris Foundations, The Clark Foundation, The Heckscher Foundation for Children, The Lodestar Foundation, The New York Community Trust, SeaChange Capital Partners, and a number of philanthropic individuals.

Founded in 1997 by Nancy Becker and Adriana Mnuchin, and led for the past 10 years by Board President K. Ann McDonald and Artistic Director Michael Sexton, The Shakespeare Society is a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the enjoyment, understanding, and appreciation of William Shakespeare's works through performance, commentary, and educational activities. The Shakespeare Society's humanist mission-artistic, literary, and educational-is to bring to everyone the joy and transformative power of Shakespeare's works. It is the only organization of its kind in New York City devoted entirely to Shakespeare. Its programs serve the city's entire population-laymen and academics, students and teachers, audience members and theater professionals, young and old. In 2007, The Shakespeare Society expanded its education programming dramatically through the founding of the Hunts Point Children's Shakespeare Ensemble and creation of development programs for theater artists. Over the past two decades, The Shakespeare Society has produced, directed, and presented over 175 humanities and artistic events exploring virtually all of Shakespeare's plays and poetry, and featuring actors performing excerpts from the plays, live and on film; academics discussing the plays' themes, language and meaning; singers performing portions of operas based on the plays (in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera); dancers presenting excerpts from Shakespeare-inspired ballets (in collaboration with the American Ballet Theater and the New York City Ballet); and panel discussions with directors, actors, and other theater-makers about how they bring Shakespeare's works to the stage. In support of its mission to strive to be a Shakespeare center for all New York audiences and institutions, and to shine a light on Shakespeare productions and other Shakespeare offerings from all over New York, The Shakespeare Society has partnered over the years with myriad other organizations in presenting its events, including other humanities, cultural, artistic, and educational organizations including The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center Theater's Mostly Mozart Festival, Poets House, The Players Foundation for Theatre Education, The Folger Shakespeare Library, The English Speaking Union, NYU Graduate Acting Program, Rutgers University, New York Review of Books, School of the Visual Arts, Globe Education, the Shakespeare Institute, and theaters - large and small including The Public Theater, Red Bull Theater, Theater for a New Audience, Letter of Marque Theater Company, Hudson Valley Shakespeare, Fiasco Theater Company, New York Theater Workshop, Classic Stage Company, Westport County Playhouse, Pearl Theater Company, BAM, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. And for the last 10 years and even longer for some Board members, The Shakespeare Society has had Board members without whom it would never have survived, and who are thrilled to have shepherded The Society into this wonderful alliance with The Public Theater.

THE PUBLIC is theater of, by, and for the people. Artist-driven, radically inclusive, and fundamentally democratic, The Public continues the work of its visionary founder Joe Papp as a civic institution engaging, both on-stage and off, with some of the most important ideas and social issues of today. Conceived over 60 years ago as one of the nation's first nonprofit theaters, The Public has long operated on the principles that theater is an essential cultural force and that art and culture belong to everyone. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Executive Director Patrick Willingham, The Public's wide breadth of programming includes an annual season of new work at its landmark home at Astor Place, Free Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, The Mobile Unit touring throughout New York City's five boroughs, Public Forum, Under the Radar, Public Studio, Public Works, Public Shakespeare Initiative, and Joe's Pub. Since premiering HAIR in 1967, The Public continues to create the canon of American Theater and is currently represented on Broadway by the Tony Award-winning musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda and John Leguizamo's Latin History for Morons. Their programs and productions can also be seen regionally across the country and around the world. The Public has received 59 Tony Awards, 169 Obie Awards, 53 Drama Desk Awards, 54 Lortel Awards, 32 Outer Critic Circle Awards, 13 New York Drama Desk Awards, and 6 Pulitzer Prizes.publictheater.org

Public Theater Partner, Supporter, and Member tickets for the Spring 2018 PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE INITIATIVE season will be available on Thursday, January 25. Single tickets, starting at $20, will be available on Saturday, January 27 by calling (212) 967-7555, visiting www.publictheater.org, or in person at the Taub Box Office at The Public Theater at 425 Lafayette Street. Tickets for Public Shakespeare Presents: Speak of Me As I Am: Othello on Stage will be available at a later date.

Please note the final line-up is subject to change. The Library at The Public is open nightly for food and drinks, beginning at 5:30 p.m., and Joe's Pub at The Public continues to offer some of the best music in the city. For more information, visit www.publictheater.org.

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