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Shakespeare & Beyond

What's onstage at Shakespeare theaters in May

Each month, we bring you a snapshot of Shakespeare in performance across America. What’s onstage this month? To find out, we checked in with our partners at the Annapolis Shakespeare Company, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Shakespeare Company, and Theatre for a New Audience.

Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center hosts The Acting Company and The University of Delaware’s Resident Ensemble Players’ Twelfth Night (through May 27), directed by Tony nominee Maria Aitken (The 39 Steps).

Desdemona (Alejandra Escalante) insists she’s been faithful and begs Othello (Chris Butler) to spare her life.

Desdemona (Alejandra Escalante) insists she’s been faithful and begs Othello (Chris Butler) to spare her life. Photo by Jenny Graham, Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Othello (through October 28) and Henry V (through October 27) continue at Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Othello director and OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch emphasizes that play’s unusual intimacy with a cast of just 12 actors—“by far the smallest” cast to appear in a long-running Shakespeare production in the Festival’s Angus Bowmer Theatre. Rauch says:

It is Shakespeare’s most intimate tragedy… You know, the majority of the play is very intimate scenes between two, or at most three, people…Really digging into what’s going on between the major characters by distilling the cast down to the smallest possible number feels really important to me.