http://samsara.circus.com/~jasona/shakespearSantaCruz.html (World Wide Web Directory, ~04/1995)Box Office (408) 459-4168
Single Tickets are available at the box office or by phone after July 1. Subscribers may order additional single tickets which will be filled with their subscription order and receive $1 off regular ticket prices.
Sponsored by Dean Gary Lease for the UCSC Humanities Division
Directed by Shakespeare Santa Cruz Artistic Director Danny Scheie
The Merchant of Venice is, absolutely, the most controversial play in the canon. It is also one of Shakespeare's best known and most performed plays and includes his most beautiful poetry on the subject of religious and racial intolerance. It is about outsiders, and the natural human desire to get on the inside track. Shylock, Portia, and Antonio (the title character) form a central triangle of outsiders. One is fiercely proud of his outsider status and is unwilling to compromise; one is self-defeated by his love for another man and compromises too much; the third seems to have all the trappings of a solid insider, until she changes her gender and discovers just how outside she is, due solely to her biological sex.
Count on Artistic Director Danny Scheie to stamp his unique directorial signature on this riveting, funny and ultimately surprising classic play.
Directed by Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker
The Marry Wives of Windsor is Shakespeare's episode of Three's Company - so say some sour-spirited theater critics of Shakespeare's sit-com uniquely set in the middle class. With that deliciously tempting remark off we go with this uproarious PG-rated sex farce. Be prepared for one of Shakespeare Santa Cruz's most outrageous contemporary translations yet in this production featuring glorious feminine revenge in all its fury. Associate Artistic Director Mark Rucker, whose previous Festival credits include Company, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Our Town, Macbeth and Damn Yankees, has long been fermenting the idea of plopping the comic rogue Falstaff, down among the trailer-park set in the stylish(?) 1970s. The time has come for "Shakespeare-in-the-(Trailer)-Park." Bring the entire family. The Merry Wives of Windsor will be a hilarious hoot of an afternoon in the sundappled glen.
Directed and translated by Associate Artistic Director Paul Whitworth
Last season's exploration into the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries proved an explosive hit with the production of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. This year, we are extremely excited to be presenting the U.S. premiere of The Rape of Tamar - a biblical story filtered through the imagination of the seventeenth century Spanish monk Tirso de Molina, one of the most popular and successful of the many playwrights of Spain's "Golden Age."
The Rape of Tamar focuses on one of history's most powerful dynasties and raises provocatively contemporary issues about incest, hubris, fate and self-deception in human passion. Warrior, lover and poet, King David is forced to confront the sins of his past and to choose between mercy and justice. The play brings to life the mythic characters of the Old Testament and welds them with the searing heat and passion of Tirso's morally declining Spain, creating an especially haunting and spirited figure in the title characters of King David's daughter, Tamar.
Associate Artistic Director Paul Whitworth (whose many Festival appearances include title roles in Hamlet, Richard II and Henry V) will direct his own exquisite translation - which won critical acclaim in the 1992 English premiere of the play in London. Don't miss our U.S. premiere on this fast-moving tragicomic production in the Performing Arts Theater.