Lenox — For 47 years, Shakespeare & Company has offered both performances and theater education programs to thousands of theater patrons.
While the COVID pandemic is largely in the rearview mirror, Allyn Burrows, Shakespeare & Company artistic director and president of the Board of Trustees, told The Berkshire Edge that the theater company is still bouncing back. “It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since the pandemic, but it’s been a long road back,” said Burrows. “Since the pandemic, attendance to our shows has been up and down. Last year, our season held its own against 2023, which was also a strong season. So we’re feeling good going into this season. For the past few seasons, it has felt like a perfect storm because it’s not just COVID we’ve been up against. We have been up against live video streaming of events that took place during COVID-19, and we also have AI and many other things that live, in-person programming is going up against.”
Burrows said that despite the 21st-century challenges facing the theater group, he is confident that Shakespeare & Company will continue to thrive. “We offer live events, which cannot be replaced via streaming or AI,” Burrows said. “A live event makes people vibrate, resonate, and dig into the stories that we perform. As human beings, we always want a good story at the end of the day. When that story is fully embodied with people on stage, people will be transported from their mundane lives. That’s what we consider our jobs. Our audience takes their seats, and then we roll it all out.”
Before the season officially begins on Saturday, March 15, at 2:30 p.m., at the Tina Packer Playhouse, the Northeast Regional Tour of Shakespeare will perform a sensory-friendly version of “Macbeth,” designed for audience members with various sensory needs, including those on the autism spectrum and people with social, cognitive, or physical challenges.
The Northeast Regional Tour of Shakespeare will return for an open-captioned performance of “Macbeth” on Saturday, March 22, at 2:30 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Shakespeare & Company’s 2025 season officially begins with the world premiere of “The Victim” by Lawrence Goodman at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, with performances from June 19 to July 20. Shakespeare says the following about the plot of “The Victim.”
A successful New York doctor whose racial diversity training has gone horribly wrong. A health aide grappling with racism during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Holocaust survivor facing her own horror and finding her way back to love and healing. Three women, three interconnected monologues. Who gets to call herself a victim? Who is the perpetrator?
Performances will be directed by Daniel Gidron, who previously directed “Master Class” at Shakespeare & Company.
“To me, ‘The Victim’ is a powerful piece,” Burrows said. “It’s all about three women at the intersection of their lives. World premiers are always a lot of fun because people always show up intrigued to hear the words performed at the performances for the first time. As a raw material, you have to take a certain risk with world-premiere performances, but I think it’s a risk worth taking.”
From July 1 to July 6, Shakespeare & Company will feature performances of “Shake it Up: A Shakespeare Cabaret” at the Tina Packer Playhouse. First premiered last year at Shakespeare & Company, “Shake it Up” is described as a mash-up of modern music with Shakespeare’s verse.
Director Burrows and Jacob Ming-Trent co-curated the performance. “It’s all about Shakespeare meeting rock and roll,” Burrows said. “We took some of the great rock and roll songs influenced by Shakespeare, and we put a full band on stage with text projected against the wall. We worked our way through the songs and how they related in this intersection with Shakespeare’s texts. This is a way of taking any hesitation that people have had about Shakespeare and completely throwing it out the window because it’s such a fun performance. When we performed this last year, we had people dancing in the aisles and the audience forgot they were coming to a Shakespeare play.”
From July 12 to August 10, the theater company will stage outdoor performances of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in its Arthur S. Waldstein Amphitheatre. Shakespeare & Company founding member Kevin Coleman and longtime company member Jonathan Epstein will direct the performances.
“We haven’t performed ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in a long time,” Burrows said. “Both Kevin and Johnathan pitched the performance to me separately. I told them they should direct it together because, to me, collaborations are a good thing and we should double down on our efforts to work together.”
From July 25 to August 24, the theater company will have performances of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning play “The Piano Lesson.” The play, which is set in 1936 Great Depression-era Pittsburgh, is written as “a testament to the complexities of family, history, and legacy.” Christopher Edwards, artistic director of the Actors’ Shakespeare Project in Boston, will direct the performances.
“While this just came out as a movie on Netflix, people will be able to get an upfront and personal experience of ‘The Piano Lesson’ when it is performed at the Elayne Bernstein Theater,” Burrows said. “Chris has done several things with us before, including our production of ‘Fences,’ so I’m excited about these performances.”
The last performance of the season, from August 14 to August 24, is Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” in the Tina Packer Playhouse, co-directed by Burrows and Founding Artistic Director Tina Packer.
“It’s a challenging play to perform, especially in this age, due to its themes of misogyny,” Burrows said. “The way the lead character Petruchio starves Katherina, and how he brutalizes her in many ways to break her is misogynistic. We’re going to do a different take on it. The thing about Shakespeare is that, through performances, you can project what the story means by staying true to the words. But others have realized that there are many different interpretations to the stories that Shakespeare has laid out there.”
Visit Shakespeare & Company’s website for more details on its 2025 season.
