THE LITTLE SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL
UNDER St. Marks
94 St. Marks Pl.
August 3-19, $20 streaming, $25 in person
www.frigid.nyc/festivals/shakesfest
One of the most important aspects of William Shakespeare’s canon is how open each play is to interpretation and adaptation. The Bard’s works are regularly retold with changes in time and location, race and gender, style and genre. It’s gotten so that it is rarer to see a traditional production than one involving significant alterations, including such elements as contemporary pop music, modern-day political issues, the rise of a minor character, and zombies.
Presented by FRIGID New York, the Little Shakespeare Festival offers Bard fans the opportunity to see seven shows that take unique looks at different aspects of Shakespeare’s genius. Running August 3-19 at UNDER St. Marks in the East Village, the third annual fest is curated by Conor D Mullen, who created As You Will with David Brummer and George Hider, an unscripted evening of improv in which the audience shouts out titles of plays that Shakespeare might have written had he not died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, and then the cast acts them out; among the past titles are Eight Merry Spiders, That Doth Not Go There, and 1601: A Space Odyssey.
Kristina Del Mar stars in Djingo Productions’ Wheel of Fortune at Little Shakespeare Festival (photo by Miguel Garzón Martínez)
“Sitting in UNDER St. Marks, it’s not too hard for me to imagine William Shakespeare working here,” Mullen said in a statement. “He’d have used his words to turn this space into a Roman dungeon, a Scottish castle, or a moonlit Athenian forest. His actors would have loved having the audience so close they could speak with them directly. And, of course, he would have been very approving of a bar inside the theater, since in his own time audience members who wanted a drink had to leave the theater and visit a local bar. It’s a reminder for me that Shakespeare doesn’t just live on when performed in giant, open air amphitheaters or big, Broadway houses; he also lives in these most humble of places, where I think he would have felt quite at home. Here, with you and me, at the Little Shakespeare Festival.”
Five of the six presentations (one is a double bill) are also available as livestreams so you can watch them in your own home. Barefoot Shakespeare Company’s Lady Capulet, written by Melissa Bell and directed by Emily Gallagher, is a prequel to Romeo and Juliet that explores the role of women in today’s society; Jianzi Colón-Soto stars as Rose Capulet. Djingo Productions’ Wheel of Fortune, written and directed by Jing Ma, is a problem play dealing with isolation, connection, and mass shootings in the digital age. C.A.G.E. Theatre Company’s THE ROOM of Falsehood, written and directed by Michael Hagins, reimagines Tommy Wiseau’s late-night cult favorite, The Room, through a Shakespearean lens. First Flight Theatre Company’s Shakespeare’s Deaths and Shakespeare’s Ladies at Tea, both directed by Frank Farrell, are a forty-five-minute double header in which, first, five actors depict all major deaths in Shakespeare, and then, second, eight female Bard characters sit down for a chat in which they can only speak lines that Shakespeare wrote for them. And in Hamlet Isn’t Dead’s Shrew You! written by David Andrew Laws and directed by Sophia Carlin, four actresses repair The Taming of the Shrew.
Most of the shows run an hour or less (Lady Capulet is 110 minutes); in-person tickets are only $25, while livestream access is $20, in order to get an intimate little taste of Shakespeare in 2023.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]