Photo Flash: Connecticut Repertory Theatre Opens its 2016-17 Season with KING LEAR

Connecticut Repertory Theatre (CRT) opens its 2016-17 season with William Shakespeare's King Lear. Associate Artistic Director Dale AJ Rose will direct. Performances will be held in the Harriet S. Jorgenson Theatre from October 6ththrough October 16th, 2016. For tickets and information please visit crt.uconn.edu or call (860) 486-2113.

King Lear will coincide with the Folger Shakespeare Library's national tour of First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare, which will bring a rare first folio to UConn's campus where it will be displayed September 1-25, 2016 in the William Benton Museum of Art. Celebrating the First Folio's visit to UConn, the Connecticut Repertory Theatre presents a play that has fascinated audiences for more than 400 years and stands as Shakespeare's most towering achievement,King Lear. The aging monarch resolves to retire and divide his kingdom. In the process his family and country are torn apart and so begins Lear's descent into madness. A once proud monarch is forced to wrestle with morality as he confronts his own mortality. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, "No man will ever write a better tragedy than Lear."

Director Dale AJ Rose, who is the Director of Performance Training at The University of Connecticut says, "In examining King Lear, Why is it that wielding absolute power brings the focus away from those affected and onto the individual wielding the power. For Lear, it is only after he abdicates his poser that he begins to experience what it is to exist in this world and the responsibility to being human. Other themes include relationships of parents and children, what is unconditional love, do the gods exist and care about what we do to each other in this world?"

Ryan Shea (Fool), Graeme Malcolm (Lear), and Raphael Nash Thompson (Gloucester)

Graeme Malcolm (Lear) and Arlene Bozich (Goneril)

Raphael Nash Thompson (Gloucester)

KING LEAR by William Shakespeare starring Graeme Malcolm as Lear in onstage at Connecticut Repertory Theatre thru 10/16. Info at crt.uconn.edu.