Tennessee Shakespeare Company Reveals 16th Season at the Edge of Shelby Farms Park and Throughout Shelby County

 Tennessee Shakespeare Company today announced its expanded 16th performance season in Memphis featuring William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Hamlet, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and the works of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver in the Southern Literary Salon.

TSC also will launch its inaugural Classical Theatre Apprentice Program for early-career professionals from around the country who will continue their classical training with TSC’s teachers, actors, stage management, and technical theatre professionals for eight months while in residency in Memphis.

Committed to classical arts innovation in the United States, TSC is now in its 16th season as the State’s only permanently-based, professional, classical theatre.  Acclaimed by the National Endowment for the Arts for its results-based Education and Outreach Center, TSC is committed to artistic excellence, teaching innovation, and social betterment.

TSC believes that the plays of William Shakespeare and classical theatre are for everyone; that education, training, and community outreach are equal colleagues to live performance; that the arts must move closer to the center of every Tennessee child’s formal education; and that our State needs the poetry, collaboration, and healing truths the world’s finest writers and artists provide.

Across 15 seasons, TSC has achieved over 700,000 points of contact through 65 productions in 40 community venues; educated 300,000 students in 130 area schools; served the health needs of 1,000 veterans at the Memphis V.A. Medical Center; and brought Shakespeare and creative writing to 500 youths in three detention centers. 

“We are now a year-round classical theatre and education innovation center with a budget that for our first time exceeds one million dollars,” says Founder and Artistic Director, Dan McCleary.  “TSC’s Board of Directors, our stalwart individual donors and patrons, our corporate sponsors, and our State and federal governments have made possible over these past three years our staff’s continued work and commitment to our community in ways we had never imaged.  And now, we get to come back out swinging for the fences with more performance weeks, projecting more students contacted, more military Veterans cared for, more underserved communities accessed, and more detained juveniles taught than ever in our history.  We have a deep desire to be of service to everyone in our community through Shakespeare.  We are expanding our personnel capacity this season for the best reason: our work is needed and wanted.  For us, that’s the best feeling in the world.”  

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