The 2023/24 season for Seattle Shakespeare Company will include tragedy, comedy, and everything in between. The indoor season will include The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Comedy of Errors, The Bed Trick, and Romeo and Juliet. Productions have been trimmed to sleek three-week runs, and the company will use the fourth weekend to feature an inaugural run of special one-off events.
Seattle Shakespeare Company’s education programming will include youth productions of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Romeo and Juliet. An education tour in the spring will present Macbeth performed by professional actors.
“I hope everyone is going to fall in love with everything we’ve got on the docket just as much as we have while crafting it,” said Artistic Director George Mount. “We had the fun challenge of thinking creatively about how we can rebuild our community during a time of such uncertainty while simultaneously being able to foster the future of the organization.”
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Our old friend Falstaff has a ploy to make some easy money—woo Mistress Page and Mistress Ford and thus gain access to their husbands’ wealth. It shouldn’t be too challenging; he can be quite a charming and insightful man when it benefits him. He sends the mistresses notes with declarations of love, but in a small town like Windsor, everyone knows everyone else’s business and Mistresses Page and Ford soon realize their notes are exact copies.
Rather than take that insult lying down, they make dates with Falstaff, scheming to be discovered in flagrante by their husbands and so to achieve their saucy revenge on the knight. Throw in a cartload of other zany characters and watch shenanigans ensue!
The Comedy of Errors
What are the chances there’s a guy walking around town with your face? What are the chances there’s another guy walking around town with your servant’s face? Antipholus and Dromio encounter some trouble when their doppelgangers seem to be on the loose in Ephesus, not realizing that their identical twins with identical names were separated from them in a shipwreck decades earlier. This sets up a chain of dominos: launching several existential crises, arrests, assaults, and an exorcism until the truth of the doubling is finally revealed. The descent into hysteria is reversed with a family reunion and a happily ever after.
Jimmy Shields makes his Seattle Shakespeare directorial debut following his appearance as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in 2023’s Twelfth Night. Originally adapted for Wooden O, this small ensemble version of The Comedy of Errors cleaves right to the heart of the comedy and features actors playing their own twins to hilarious effect.
The Bed Trick
College: a time of freedom, of frivolity, of friskiness. Freshmen Lulu and Marianne test their limits as they party through the school year in search of their place in the world: Marianne is newly eighteen, while Lulu tries to reignite a spark with her boyfriend of ten years. But when their drama-nerd-roommate Harriet brings in baggage from a student production of Measure for Measure, ideas of consent and manipulation start to seep into their lives.
Seattle favorite Keiko Green brings her sharp provocation and biting humor to a new play that puts contemporary discussions in direct conversation with one of the most problematic devices in Shakespeare. In the grand tradition of the problem plays, The Bed Trick has no answers, but will have you pondering the questions long after you leave the theatre.
Romeo and Juliet
Conflict is brewing in the streets of Verona as a new generation ages into a war they have no stake in–yet. Young Capulets and Montagues have spent their whole lives being taught to hate one another, but when Romeo and Juliet meet, all they see is their love and what they’re willing to sacrifice to be together. Desire, parental expectations, and a drive for independence pressure these lovers to make choices that could change the fate of their whole community.
Artistic Director George Mount guides this production of Romeo and Juliet that will leave you questioning what you thought you knew about one of the most famous love stories ever told.