New Works Festival Begins This Weekend At The Long Beach Shakespeare Company

The Long Beach Shakespeare Company’s New Works Festival will return to the Helen Borgers Theatre this weekend with a bold lineup of fresh voices and theatrical surprises.

Kicking things off is Speak I Will, a radical reimagining of the Bard’s canon that blends 32 of Shakespeare’s plays, four sonnets, and even the legendary lost play Cardenio into a fever dream of high drama and high fashion. Iconic characters like Lady Macbeth, Henry V, Beatrice, and King Lear collide in a mashup that’s part literary remix, part renaissance rave. Directed with style and swagger, Speak I Will fuses classical language with contemporary urgency—Shakespeare for the Spotify generation.

On Saturday afternoon, the tone turns urgent and emotional with The Lives to Come, a gripping new drama set against the backdrop of a corrupt pharmaceutical empire. When two young lovers discover they’re the key to a life-saving treatment, they’re forced to navigate corporate greed, personal sacrifice, and the thin line between science and survival. With shades of Romeo and Juliet and the high-stakes maneuvering of Succession, this timely piece dives deep into the ethics of medicine and the price of love.

Saturday evening delivers a dynamic dark-comedy double bill: Death Takes a Vacation and The Apollo Waltz.

In Death Takes a Vacation, the Grim Reaper decides to take some much-needed PTO—by crashing with a suburban couple. As Death gets cozy on the couch, boundaries blur and hilarity ensues in a comedy that’s equal parts absurdist and eerily relatable.

Then comes The Apollo Waltz, a sharply observed psychological chamber piece centering on a famous writer, his acid-tongued daughter, and his much younger second wife. Tensions simmer and secrets unravel in a battle of wit and wounds, evoking echoes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a noir twist.

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