The Resident Acting Company Presents POLISHING SHAKESPEARE

In 2015, the news that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival had commissioned modern English translations of all of Shakespeare's plays drew alarm from purists. Over the past month, the PlayOn! Festival has been presenting all 39 translations. The month-long festival concludes on June 30th and on July 1st The Resident Acting Company will present a new play based on the powerful debate behind these translations-Polishing Shakespeare by HBO Def Poet and critically acclaimed playwright, Brian Dykstra and starring Bradford Cover, Robin Leslie Brown and Kate Rigg. The play will be directed by Margarett Perry.

When a dot-com billionaire offers a theatre a large sum of money to translate Shakespeare's plays into more understandable, contemporary English, the artistic director and the commissioned writers have to confront the complexities of the challenge, their respect for the original source material, and the pressures of surviving as theatre artists in an age where the commercial often outstrips the artistic. Polishing Shakespeare, written in iambic pentameter, explores their shifting loyalties, to each other, the art form, and The Bard. Immediately following the reading, there will be a discussion between Dave Hitz, the real-life dot-com businessman who started PlayOn!, Lisa Harrow, a celebrated Shakespeare actress who has performed with The Royal Shakespeare Company and was a leading player in John Barton's Playing Shakespeare Series, and Brian Dykstra, the playwright of Polishing Shakespeare.

Dave and Brian are on opposite sides of the aisle on the issue of translating Shakespeare. But rather than firing shots on social media-they've been engaging with each other in person, old school style. And last week, Brian and Dave joined each other for a two-day Much Ado experiment-sitting next to each other at the PlayOn! reading of Much Ado and then the following night seeing Much Ado in the Park together along with Resident Acting Company Artistic Director, Bradford Cover. They went out after each performance to discuss what they experienced.

Lisa Harrow has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company and was a leading player in John Barton's Playing Shakespeare series. Among her many credits, Lisa has played Prospero twice, as a man, and in 2016 won the Joe A Calloway Award for Volumnia in Coriolanus produced by Red Bull Theatre-a performance of which the New York Times said, "Her delivery of verse is hypnotic in its beauty."

Resident Acting Company is made up of an ensemble of highly experienced actors who have been working together for many years, as part of The Pearl Theatre Company. They perform the great classic plays because we know that they speak to us and address the issues that we as a society are facing today. The company believes in mining the language of these plays fully, and performing them in a way that is clear, exciting, innovative, and moving. Because of their many years of working together, they possess a powerful and immediate ability to create. They create work based upon the idea that theatre is at its best when the creators truly collaborate and build on each other's ideas. They not only find innovative ways to work together, but re-examine traditional forms, challenging conventional ideas about gender, championing the inclusion of all ethnicities on its stages, and in its audience, and ultimately penetrating and inhabiting the heart of the plays they perform, with the intention of changing the way people think about themselves and the world.

For Tickets: https://www.artful.ly/store/events/18111

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