Honoring Shakespeare’s Birthday
April 2020…and Beyond!
Dear friends,
In the spring of 2020 we all experienced a life-altering event – the global pandemic of coronavirus, or COVID-19.
As I write this, many of us are still hunkered down at home, and that of course includes our Festival Theatre family. It’s very much like many times Shakespeare lived through, in which the plague closed the theatres and forced people to temporarily do without many things they never even knew they relied on. And yet, in the midst of fear, anxiety and loss, people still wrote, planned, dreamed, and looked forward to the time when they could make plays again.
April is Shakespeare’s birth month, and many believe that he was born around the date on which he died – April 23rd. We wanted to celebrate the life of this extraordinary playwright and celebrate our art as theatre makers and stakeholders by choosing our favorite Shakespearean monologues and soliloquys and posting them to our social media platforms every day at 4:23PM CST. The pieces you see here are the videos from this project.
We’ve had contributions from our artistic associates and leadership, staff, board members, former and future actors and artists, and patrons! We’d like to keep this going even after Shakespeare’s birthday, as a testament to our hope for better days coming and our faith in getting to share these stories and others with you again very soon.
Sincerely,
Barbara Zahora
Artistic Director, Oak Park Festival Theater
