TN Shakespeare Company Welcomes New Board Members

Tennessee Shakespeare Company, the Mid-South's professional classical theatre and education organization, announced the addition of four new members to its Board of Directors, led by President Owen B. Tabor, M.D.

Now in the midst of its eighth season, TSC has expanded the Board to its largest membership. The Board is made up of 26 members and now six Emeritus members.

New members voted onto the Board beginning FY16 for their first three-year terms are:

Elise L. Jordan, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer with FedEx Express.

Dorothy O. Kirsch, Memphis philanthropist with a long history of supporting the arts and culture in the Mid-South.

Anne Johnson Mead, partner at the law firm of Butler, Sevier, Hinsley & Reid, PLLC, focusing her practice on litigation, collaborative law, and mediation. Anne is a member of the Tennessee and Memphis Bar Associations, and serves on the Board for the Family Law Section of the Memphis Bar.

Tracy Vezina Patterson, Director of Alumni Relations at Rhodes College. She is an alumna of Rhodes College and the University of Memphis School of Law. Tracy is actively involved in several ministries of St. George's Episcopal Church and has served on the Vestry and as Senior Warden. Past civic involvements include Memphis Civitan and Special Kids and Families.

And after more than five years of Board service, John Paul (Jack) Jones moves to TSC's Emeritus Board. He is the former publisher of The Memphis Daily News and a past president of the Tennessee Press Association and the American Court and Commercial Newspapers, Inc., and also a past member of the Memphis Literacy Council. Mr. Jones is a Board member of the Benjamin C. Hooks Library, the Rock 'n Soul Museum, and a founder of the Memphis Economic Club.

"When we were still establishing the company, Jack Jones' name on our masthead let everyone in the Mid-South know we were a going concern," says Founder and Producing Artistic Director Dan McCleary. "In lending his time, experience, name, and love of Shakespeare to us, Mr. Jones had a galvanizing effect for us community-wide. I am forever grateful to him, and I am so pleased he will remain a counsel to us as he transitions to our honored Emeritus group of founding Board members.

"Each of our new members has a participatory history with TSC, and this pleases me very much. Elise Jordan's daughter has joined us in our summer camp, and of course Elise is in a position of extraordinary responsibility at FedEx, which has continued to be a lead sponsor of TSC's productions and our Romeo and Juliet Project. Tracy Patterson and her family have been with us from the start and represents Rhodes College, the first college here to support our efforts. Dorothy Kirsch, an experienced play-goer, has been a TSC audience member for years and has been supporting new cultural and arts projects in Memphis for decades. And Anne Mead generously has helped coordinate our annual Gala in the past and, I am thrilled to say, will do so again this season. I am heartened by our new members' volunteerism and belief in us and our mission."

TSC recently completed its 400: Shakespeare Feast in which it produced six Shakespeare titles for the first time in its history: The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard II, Love's Labor's Lost, and Much Ado About Nothing. The series commemorated the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.

The season kicked off with the year's first Southern Literary Salon featuring Harper Lee. Both the Feast and Salon exceeded ticket projections.

Concurrently with the performance season, TSC's education program has toured its original show Lend Me Thy Sword to 1,000 students in schools throughout the southeast United States. Another 1,000 Memphis students are scheduled in the upcoming months. TSC's 90-minute school production of Romeo and Juliet is being seen by 5,500 students, and the nationally-recognized Romeo and Juliet Project is now teaching daily in over 520 sessions in 15 Memphis high schools serving 4,600 students with an innovative non-violence residency using Shakespeare's text. In addition, 31 in-school playshops and residencies have been taught this semester, reaching nearly 900 students.

Up next for TSC is its first production of Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well at Dixon Gallery & Gardens from December 10-20 directed by Dan McCleary. Student matinees are over-sold for the production, which is honoring founding Board member Barbara B. Apperson.