Adirondack Shakes Company to bring RAW Classics Back to Schroon Lake

Adirondack Shakespeare Company (ADK Shakes) is returning to the Adirondack region for its second full Summer Festival Season. The company plans to follow last summer's successful presentations of As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth with an all-new expanded season featuring ADK Shakes' trademark RAW performance style.

This year, the company will present A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice, along with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield and Theseus and the Minotaur, an original children's production by Sean Adams.

ADK Shakes' adrenaline-fueled ‘Shakespeare IN THE RAW' performance style strips away all extraneous elements of production, leaving the actors and audience to build the world of the play using only Shakespeare's words as their guide. Celeste Moratti, who will play Helena in this year's production of Midsummer, says of the RAW method: "It's a head first-no safety net dive into Shakespeare." Laura Montes, who played Juliet in last year's Romeo and Juliet and is set to play Hermia in Midsummer says, "It's the acting equivalent of jumping out of an airplane. Even other accomplished actors I know have learned what ADK Shakes does and responded with, ‘How do you do that? It's INSANE!' Insane, perhaps, but I've never felt more vitally present on stage as I have doing the RAW. It will be exciting to venture into new territory by producing non-Shakespeare plays this season."

This daring performance style continues to draw attention, as evidenced by ADK Shakes' successful Bookend Project at St. John's University this past year, where the company presented Titus Andronicus and The Tempest at the universities' Queens and Manhattan campuses.

The Adirondack region tour of Complete Works will begin July 3, while the Mainstage Season opens July 21and will run through August 7. Performances of the children's show Theseus and the Minotaur are set to run from July 27 through August 6. Performances will take place at the Boathouse Theater in Schroon Lake Village, as well as the Little Theater on The Farm in Fort Edward, the Town Hall in Long Lake, LARAC Gallery in Glen Falls, and other locations throughout the Park. Weather permitting, the final weekend of performances will be held at the outdoor amphitheatre at the Scaroon Manor Day-Use Facility.

This event is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Program, administered locally by the Lower Adirondack Regional Arts Council.

For more information, a full performance schedule and to purchase tickets, please visit www.adkshakes.org.