Theatre for a New Audience Teams with NYPL for AMERICAN SHAKESPEARE Talk

Theatre for a New Audience and The New York Public Library mark the close of 2016 - the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death - with a free public conversation on Shakespeare's pervasive and perennial role in American culture.

American Shakespeare will feature speakers James Shapiro (author of The Year of Lear and editor of the anthology Shakespeare in America) and Ayanna Thompson (author of Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America), and a traveling exhibit of rare Shakespeare materials from the collections of The New York Public Library.

This talk and exhibition will be presented one-night only, Monday, November 21, at 6:30pm at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Place.

Profs. Shapiro and Thompson will discuss how the New World came to claim "the Man from Stratford," and how his language has been re-discovered, by each generation, to articulate the comedies and tragedies, public and private, of American life. William P. Kelly, Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries of The New York Public Library, will introduce the evening.

This conversation is the second in a series of free events co-presented by The New York Public Library and Theatre for a New Audience: public dialogues between the Library's Shakespeare collections and Theatre for a New Audience's family of artists and scholars.

This event is free, but advance registration is required. To register and for more information, visit www.tfana.org/shakespeare400 or call 646-553-3881.

James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985. His books include Shakespeare and the Jews (1996), recently republished in a 20tyn anniversary edition; 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) which won the Samuel Johnson Prize; Contested Will (2010); the anthology Shakespeare in America (2014); and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (2015), which won the James Tait Black Prize. He has also co-authored and presented two BBC documentaries: Shakespeare: The King's Man and The Mysterious Mr. Webster. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Board of Governors of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and is Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at New York's Public Theater.

Ayanna Thompson is Professor of English at George Washington University. She specializes in Renaissance drama and focuses on issues of race and performance. She is the author of Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015) (co-authored with Laura Turchi), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008), and she is the editor of Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) (co-edited with Scott Newstok) and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). Professor Thompson is a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and a member of Theatre for a New Audience's Council of Scholars.

Theatre for a New Audience established a Council of Scholars to expand the scope and depth of the Theatre's Humanities programs. A primary goal of the Council is to provide perspectives that illuminate contextual themes and heighten intellectual conversation around Theatre for a New Audience's season. The Council helps to design comprehensive and integrated programs that meet the needs of target audiences and that deepen the contributions of the Theatre to Shakespeare study and scholarship over time.

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) is a modern classic theatre. It produces Shakespeare alongside other major authors from the world repertoire, such as Harley Granville Barker, Edward Bond, Adrienne Kennedy and Wallace Shawn. It has played off- and on Broadway and toured nationally and internationally. Theatre for a New Audience's productions have been honored with Tony, Obie, Drama Desk, Drama League, Callaway, Lortel and Audelco awards and nominations and reach an audience diverse in age, economics and cultural backgrounds. Theatre for a New Audience created and runs the largest in-depth program in the New York City Public Schools to introduce students to Shakespeare, and has served more than 128,000 students since the program began in 1984.

The New York Public Library is a free provider of education and information for the people of New York and beyond. With 92 locations­including research and branch libraries­throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the Library offers free materials, computer access, classes, exhibitions, programming and more to everyone from toddlers to scholars, and has seen record numbers of attendance and circulation in recent years. The New York Public Library serves more than 18 million patrons who come through its doors annually and millions more around the globe who use its resources at www.nypl.org. To offer this wide array of free programming, The New York Public Library relies on both public and private funding. Learn more about how to support the Library at nypl.org/support.

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