Stage Write

Mark your calendars! The dates and locations of this year's Bard Fest have been announced. The annual festival brings together multiple theatre companies and this year, multiple locations, to present Shakespeare's work.  The Shakespeare festival is returning to the IndyFringe Basile Theatre and expanding to The Cat Theatre in Carmel and The Theatre at the Fort in Lawrence. It will include all new original productions of Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and  Macbeth. It will also feature two additional productions of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? and the award-winning Elizabeth Rex by Timothy Findley. The shows, produced by Bard Fest,  will continue to bring the region’s finest actors to Indianapolis and provide unique visions of the Bard of Avon along with modern classical contemporaries. Bard Fest was first conceived by Glenn Dobbs in the spring of 2015. Launching with an admittedly “overly ambitious” schedule of eight p...

Hamlet This season the American Players Theatre is tackling one of Shakespeare’s most revered tragedies, Hamlet. This production includes the full text and clocks in at three and a half hours with one 20 minute intermission. And they’ve made every single minute count! The show stars Matt Schwader as the tortured prince. He nails Hamlet’s infamous rise and fall of emotions and his delicate balance of sanity. He also manages to infuse just the right amount of humor and snark into Shakespeare’s lines. He is broken and grieving and yet he embraces his role of feigned madness to achieve his goal. It’s a powerful performance. The intense drama deals with the issue of grief and love in equal parts. Hamlet is reeling from the death of his father when he finds out that his mother has married her former brother-in-law. Their marriage comes so quickly on the heels of the death that Hamlet resents both of them. Soon he learns his father was actually murdered by the usurping king, his...