KING LEAR to be Presented at The Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival
Performances will run from Tuesday-Sunday, Aug. 21-31, 2025.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Aug. 08, 2025
The Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival will return in 2025 to celebrate 25 years of serving Michiana with productions of Shakespeare’s most beloved works. This year, the NDSF Professional Company stages Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy, King Lear (Aug 21-31; previews Aug. 19-20), directed by Pirronne Yousefzadeh and featuring celebrated Chicago actor Kevin Gudahl as Lear.
“Since the founding of the Festival in 2000, the vision of our founder, Paul Rathburn, has remained constant: Bring the nation’s best artists and designers to the University of Notre Dame in order to produce world-class productions of Shakespeare’s works for the benefit of our students and wider community,” says Scott Jackson, Mary Irene Ryan Family Executive Artistic Director of Shakespeare at Notre Dame. “We are honored to carry this legacy forward for the next 25 years!”
King Lear:
In its first ever production of King Lear, the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival presents a world of power, where an aging Lear discovers that loyalty dissolves when his land and its valuable assets are divided amongst his flattering daughters. Under the direction of Pirronne Yousefzadeh, a director, writer, and educator whose work has been produced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Playmakers Repertory Company, the Kennedy Center, and many others, this production of Shakespeare’s tragic masterpiece compels its audience to “see better” and reconsider the value of truth, loyalty, and compassion.
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