Chicago Shakespeare Theater has announced much of the lineup for its 2017–18 season, including the inaugural productions in the new space dubbed “The Yard.”
That venue, built on the footprint of Navy Pier’s former Skyline Stage, will open with a one-week engagement of The Toad Knew (Sept 19–23), a spectacle from French cirque whiz James Thiérrée’s La Compagnie du Hanneton. Thiérrée last visited CST as part of its World’s Stage series in 2007 with the magical Au Revoir Parapluie. (He also happens to be the grandson of Charlie Chaplin and great-grandson of Eugene O’Neill, so talent runs in the family.)
Opening the season in the Courtyard Theatre, CST artistic director Barbara Gaines will try again to make The Taming of the Shrew palatable (Sept 16–Nov 2). For the play’s last outing here, in 2010, the theater invited playwright Neil LaBute to write a framing device that had a modern troupe staging the play while the actor playing Kate clashed with her director, who was also her girlfriend. (It didn’t help much.) This time, comedy writer Ron West has been enlisted to pen a new frame, which has Shrew being staged by a group of Suffragettes in 1919, as the passage of the 19th Amendment is under debate.
In the Upstairs theater this fall, the World’s Stage series will host a Latin American production to be named later, in conjunction with the newly formed Chicago Latino Theater Alliance’s inaugural International Latino Theater Festival (dates TBD).
Back in the Courtyard, Gary Griffin will stage Red Velvet (Dec 1–Jan 21), Lolita Chakrabarti’s play about Ira Aldridge, who in 1833 became the first black actor to play Othello in London. Interestingly, Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s new production comes just a year after the play’s first local staging, last fall at Raven Theatre.
Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I face off in Schiller’s Mary Stuart (Feb 21–Apr 15 in the Courtyard), Peter Oswald’s 2005 translation of Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play. Jenn Thompson, former co-artistic director of NYC classics company TACT (The Actors Company Theatre), directs.
Aaron Posner and Teller, the adapting and directing team behind the thrilling Tempest seen at CST in 2015, return to stage Macbeth (Apr 25–June 24 in the Yard), and Ireland’s Druid Theatre returns to Chicago with a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (May 23–June 3 in the Courtyard).
Next winter’s Short Shakespeare! production for student and family audiences will be A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Jan 24–Mar 10 in the Yard), and the company announced that this summer’s Chicago Shakespeare in the Parks outdoor tour will be Marti Lyons’s Short Shakespeare! adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which concluded a run at CST last month (schedule TBD). Additional productions for the upcoming season are expected to be announced this summer.
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