CYMBELINE

Cymbeline is a complex and exciting challenge within the Shakespeare canon. A work that remains vastly underproduced, the play features some of the “greatest hits” of the Bard’s dramaturgical tropes and tactics, exploring questions of gendered power, personal agency, and the push and pull between duty and fate. The process of working on Andrea Thome’s wonderful modern verse translation of Cymbeline was a deep dive into table work to heighten dramaturgical understanding of the language and the story we were excited to tell. The workshop nature of this process centered our deep textual work with beautiful support in costume design and minimal technical elements. In keeping with the “heightened staged reading” approach, our focus was not on full memorization; instead, we privileged working on our specificity and clarity of character and storytelling.