Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare Theatre Company

Drew Lichtenberg has been resident dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, USA, since 2011. He has worked as a dramaturg, literary manager and translator-adaptor with the Royal National Theatre, Public Theater, Roundabout, La Mama, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, McCarter Theatre Center, Yale Rep and Baltimore Center Stage. As an educator, he has taught courses at Catholic University of America, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and Eugene Lang College at the New School. His publications include The Piscatorbühne Century (2021).Deborah C. Payne is Professor Emerita of Literature at American University, USA. She was the Humanities Research Consultant at the Shakespeare Theatre Company from 2000 – 2009, and she has dramaturged for Studio Theatre, Arena Stage, the Kennedy Center, and the Bach Sinfonia. Publications include The Business of English Restoration Theatre, 1660 – 1700 (2024), Revisiting Shakespeare’s Lost Play (2016), Four Restoration Libertine Plays (2005), The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (2000) and Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theatre (1995).

This is a timely and valuable study, for the story of Shakespeare in America is inseparable from that of the nation’s capital. It was in its theaters that President Lincoln went to see, time and again, the greatest Shakespeare actors of his day (and where his assassin knew where to find him). It is there that the Folger Shakespeare Library, the most important hub in the world for early modern scholars, now stands. And it is there that a tradition of staging plays animated by their proximity to power, law-making, and protest, has informed decades of productions, some groundbreaking, others forgettable, at the Folger’s theater and then the Shakespeare Theatre Company, under the leadership of Michael Kahn and his successor, Simon Godwin (both interviewed at length). It’s a fascinating history, with many twists and turns, and Drew Lichtenberg and Deborah C. Payne do a superb job of bringing it to life.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsA Note on the TextSeries PrefacePreface by Maureen DowdIntroductionChapter 1. Shakespeare in Washington, D.C.Chapter 2. The Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger, 1986-1991Chapter 3. The Shakespeare Theatre, 1992-2007Chapter 4. Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2007-2019Chapter 5. Interview with Michael KahnChapter 6. STC, 2019-Chapter 7. Interview with Simon GodwinReferencesIndex