Before hipsters, Billyburg and soy lattes, Brooklyn's Windsor Terrace was an Irish-Italian enclave populated by people who spoke proudly in accents studded with "dese, dems and dose."
They're BA-A-A-CK, thanks to a rollicking and affectionate production of William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (Terrace) presented by Brooklyn's Brave New World Repertory Theatre's Shakespeare Festival. The open-air production will be free to the public for four performances July 28-31st at Our Lady's Field on Windsor Place (details below).Set in the big hair 1980's, Brave New World's (BNW) Merry Wives of Windsor (Terrace) re-imagines Falstaff as a befuddled mob boss and Mistress Ford and Mistress Page as the-real-housewives-of-Brooklyn-with an eye for mischief and an ear for the traditional Brooklyn accent of the time."Brooklyn's Windsor Terrace was a tight-knit working-class community in the 1980's," says BNW producing artistic director Claire Beckman. Shakespeare could have been writing about Brooklyn, she says, and she can hear it in the language. "Brooklynese, like Cockney, suits the prose beautifully. And Farrell's of Brooklyn, the popular neighborhood pub around the corner from Our Lady's Field could easily pass for Shakespeare's Garter Inn."About Brave New World Repertory Theatre
Over the past eight years around the borough, BNW has carved out a site-specific niche presenting To Kill a Mockingbird on the front porches of a tree-lined Ditmas Park street, On The Waterfront on a Brooklyn barge that toured the waterfronts of New York Bay, The Tempest on the beach and boardwalk in Coney Island, and The Crucible by lantern light for 2 weeks at The Old Stone House in Park Slope. BNW inaugurated Brave New World's Shakespeare Festival at The Prospect Park Pavilion with free staged readings of As You Like It. Based in Brooklyn, Brave New World Repertory has been a featured favorite of Celebrate Brooklyn at the Prospect Park band shell, presenting acclaimed productions of Fahrenheit 451, The Great White Hope and Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, based on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
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