Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a Duke o’er-thrown
That ended him and his daughter dear, on an island all alone.
Though not so alone as they thought they were— among spirits of earth and air
And then a conjured-magic sea-spun storm that brought their en’mies there.
The plot then thickens there, my friend, and there’s so much more to say
About the entities and denizens that populate this play
Magic.
Diplomacy is nothing but a cockfight. Sounds a bit too modern for something that happened almost 440 years ago. And yet the striking political relevance inside Friederich Schiller’s Mary Stuart (new version adapted by Peter Oswald and currently directed by Ian Gallanar) is both eerie and chilling to the world we’re presently living in. This evocative drama, despite its hefty run-time, is impressive and exceedingly well-polished upon the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s main stage for their final indoor show of the 2024/2025 season.
Do I remember this? Or is this what’s about to happen? This is no dream. This is no vision. This is the truth. Profound words. Or are they questions? What are words if not questions? You’ll hear them over and over— though never truly in one voice as one might expect from a chorus in a Greek tragedy; their effect, however, is no less striking. Chesapeake Shakespeare Company presents The Oresteia freely adapted from Aeschylus by Ellen McLaughlin and directed by Lise Bruneau.
When the play opens with the infamous “To be or not to be…” you start to think time is out of joint. Or maybe that you’ve just misremembered how Hamlet starts? You ever look at one of those maps of the United States where all the states have been shoved around into different spaces in the outline but it still mostly looks like the outline of the country even though everything is all discombobulated?
What do you get when you mix three actors clad in colored and patterned tights, a giant prop box filled with an assortment of goodies, and a script full of comic gold? Hilarity, that’s what. Baltimore’s Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s (CSC) production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] [Again] opened to a boisterous house, complete with a swanky after-party in their upstairs lounge.Â
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) was conceived and written by Adam Long,
“Oh for a muse of fire that would reach the uppermost heights of creativity— the stage a kingdom…” we’ve all heard it. We all recognize it. Do we all know that it comes from one of Shakespeare’s histories? You may have heard it, recognize it, and even know that it comes from Henry V, but you’ve never heard it until you hear it slipping delicately over the lips of Lesley Malin, Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s Executive Producing Director— or for the purposes of this performance— The Chorus.