by Bailey Basham, Messenger Staff Writer

Back for the second year, the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) will visit the Mountain next month for a series of performances and workshops.

Last year, the University of the South became a charter member of the ASC’s academic leadership consortium. For the next two years, that partnership will bring the company’s national tour to the university. In accordance to the center’s mission to recover the joys of Shakespeare’s theatre, language, and humanity, the ASC will also host Sewanee students and scholars at its home theater, Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Va.

The 2020 tour brings to the stage productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on Thursday, Feb. 6, at 7:30 p.m., and of “Imogen,” ASC’s retitled “Cymbeline,” on Saturday, Feb. 8, at 7:30 p.m. Nightly, pre-show music will begin at 7 p.m.

Director Vanessa Morosco, of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, said it is Imogen who is at the center of Shakespeare’s play, thus the renaming.

“I suspect that Shakespeare knew the title King Cymbeline would well serve his audiences nearly 450 years ago, but the play he wrote is about the lionhearted young daughter of a king who defies polite society by marrying for love, turns her world upside-down and gets a second chance at life,” Morosco said.

Pamela Macfie, professor in the department of English, said immense opportunities lie in the performances themselves—to see Shakespeare translated from page to stage transforms a student’s perception of his reckoning of the human condition. However, the opportunities the partnership brings extend well beyond the stage.

Last summer, Sewanee students Kate Graham, C’20, and Jose Hernandez, C’21, completed internships with the center, learning how to translate their study of Shakespeare from the page to production, education and outreach. The on-campus workshops hosted by the center prompt further study in the classroom as well.

“My class, which always offers a set of performances at the end of the semester, will be working with the actors on embedded stage directions in the texts. This is a way of diversifying students appreciation of the riches of Shakespeare’s texts and languages,” Macfie said.

On Friday, Feb. 7, the ASC will engage students (grades six and up) from Franklin and Grundy County schools with a special 90-minute production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which the center has reformulated to be appropriate for the students’ viewing.

“We really wanted to make this offering available because part of the ASC commitment is to demonstrate to audiences and persuade new audiences that William Shakespeare is accessible, enjoyable, relevant, entertaining,” said Macfie.

Looking ahead, the center’s newest initiative, Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries, invites contemporary playwrights to add to the ever-growing body of plays that are inspired by and in conversation with Shakespeare’s work.

“This is such an exciting initiative because seeing a Shakespeare play and a new contemporary that is inspired by it, it immediately persuades you that Shakespeare speaks to our contemporary concerns, experiences and struggles,” Macfie said. “I was there for the debut of one of the first two plays, “Anne Page Hates Fun,” which is in conversation with “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Each of those plays is about female victimization and female resilience, about what sorts of debts women assume in negotiating male threat and what resources they develop with one another in surviving such threat. What could be more relevant than that?”

Macfie said next year, one of the plays that comes to Sewanee will be the third of the new contemporaries.

“A 16th century play on stage one night and the next night, a new play that has been authored to be in dialogue with that play. I think that’s pretty exciting,” she said. “What this has further proved is William Shakespeare is nothing without intimacy. There is some kind of connectedness in the audience that is quite unlike anything I have ever experienced and a kind of magic that makes students’ appreciation of Shakespeare something of a community appearance. It’s remarkable.”

Both performances by the American Shakespeare Center are free and open to the public. After each performance, the actors and director will assemble for a talkback, answering questions about the production and the characters. For more information about each play, visit http://www.sewanee.edu/resources/arts-at-sewanee/