The First Look Festival
October 1-12, 2003
Classic Stage kicks off the 2003-2004 season with its inaugural "First Look Festival," a unique opportunity to get a preview of the projects and artists we will be developing over the course of the season. This season's festival focuses on the dark side of Elizabethan Drama, with a guided tour through a gallery of rogues, villains, and moral discreants.
Tony Award winner Ron Liebman
in a Staged Reading of
THE JEW OF MALTA
By Christopher Marlowe
Directed by Artistic Director Brian Kulick
Wednesday October 1 @ 8 pm
Before Shakespeare's Shylock there was Marlowe's Barabas, who shares
Shylock's faith but takes his penchant for revenge to gleefully unadulterated
heights. This dark comic masterpiece is replete with poison, murder,
mayhem, and even a vat of boiling oil.
Academy Award winner Frances McDormand
in a Staged Reading of
ARDEN OF FAVERSHAM
By Anonymous
Directed by Erica Schmidt
Friday October 3 @ 8 pm
Imagine pulp fiction writer James M. Cain transported back into the English
Renaissance and you just might begin to get the gist of this stark drama,
a veritable Elizabethan "Double Indemnity." Torn from the news
headlines of the time, this remarkable work recounts a wife and her lover's
cold blooded plot to murder her husband.
Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham
in a Staged Reading of
VOLPONE
By Ben Jonson
Directed by Michael Sexton
Wednesday October 8 @ 8 pm
Vice, greed, and a healthy dose of iniquity are all on glorious display
as Volpone, conman extraordinaire, is out to fleece the world one sucker
at a time. No one escapes unscatched in this uproarious satire that presents
men as beasts, with the greed of swine and the rapacity of wolves.
John Turturro stars in a Workshop Production
of
RICHARD III
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Barry Edelstein
October 10, 11 @ 8 pm; October 12 @ 3pm
No gallery of rogues and villains would be complete without one of literature's
greatest villains of all time: Richard III. The original man you love
to hate, whose winter of discontent has been a theatrical boon for countless
generations of theater-goers and artists alike. CSC welcomes back Barry
Edelstein and CSC alumnus John Turturro ("Waiting for Godot";
O Brother, Where Art Thou?) for what is sure to be an electric evening
of theater.