Gallery OPlayers Of Park Slope Hosts Summer Shakespeare Festival

The Gallery Players of Park Slope has expanded its already broad scope of theatrical offerings with the creation of Players Shakespeare, a Summer Shakespeare festival and home for the Bard in Brooklyn. As good as its name, Players Shakespeare will focus its productions on Shakepeare's plays themselves and The Players who bring them to life. Production elements - sets, lights, costumes, props - will be selectively chosen for their ability to support this creative work.

Players Shakespeare's inaugural production will be The Tragedy of King Lear with a long-standing member of the Pearl Theatre Resident Acting Company and Gallery favorite, Dominic Cuskern, as Lear. He will be joined by an exciting cast of experienced Shakespeareans, bringing to life this tale of two fathers and the terrible price they pay for letting pride, anger and greed destroy the natural order and proportion of their world.

Additionally, in keeping with the Elizabethan theatrical tradition of on-the-job training, every PS production will include at least two Acting Apprentices who will receive textual, speech and movement training along with appropriate mentoring toward performing multiple assigned roles. This Apprenticeship experience will add creative tools, improve technique, and build confidence for future projects in both classical and contemporary theatre.

In the planning stages: performances in Prospect Park; a Shakespeare Summer Youth Camp in which youngsters workshop and perform an adapted version of the play being rehearsed; BardBasics, enrichment programs for those new to Shakespeare; reading and discussion of the Bard's lesser-known works. These offerings and others to come reflect the central Players Shakespeare purpose: to access Shakespeare's plays simply, clearly, cleanly, illuminating the basic human truths that remind us we are kin.

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