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Hoosier Bard Productions


IUPUI TO STAGE A RARE LOST PLAY BY SHAKESPEARE AND FLETCHER TO OPEN IUPUI THEATER

On April 19, 2012, IUPUI will celebrate the opening of its brand new, state-of-the-art, 248-seat theater, located in the IUPUI Campus Center (420 University Blvd), by inviting the Indianapolis community to witness the performance of a literary mystery that has intrigued scholars for centuries: William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s "lost play", The History of Cardenio.

Cardenio writers caricatureThe six performances (April 19, 20, 21, 26, 27, and 28) mark both the first North American production, as well as the world premiere of a complete staging with professional actors, of Gary Taylor’s creative and scholarly reconstruction of Cardenio. Shakespeare and Fletcher based their play on Miguel de Cervantes’ Spanish masterpiece, Don Quixote, often described as the first modern novel. Their English play was an instant success, performed before the court of King James I in early 1613, and before the Ambassadors from the Duke of Savoy, ancestor of the royal family of modern Italy, in June of the same year. But though historians have long known about these accounts of Cardenio‘s early performances, no complete text of the play has survived to be viewed by modern audiences, and it is often regarded as irretrievably "lost."

But The History of Cardenio is only partially lost: many of the play’s fragments survive as a complex and enticing mystery that scholars have been attempting to resolve for centuries. IUPUI’s grand opening production will combine IUPUI students with professional actors from the Indianapolis performing arts community to demonstrate the way that a collaboration between theater researchers and performers can provide incisive solutions to long-standing critical and textual problems. Cardenio will be directed by Dr. Terri Bourus, IUPUI Associate Professor of English Drama, an Equity actor who is also Director of the IUPUI-hosted New Oxford Shakespeare project.

The New Oxford Shakespeare is an international research project, commissioned by Oxford University Press, headed by Taylor with general editor Bourus, and general editor John Jowett, Ph.D, deputy director of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon. The New Oxford Shakespeare combines the history of text technologies with the history of performance, and the project, when completed, will create a Shakespeare edition in multiple media formats for the twenty-first century. Earlier this year, Bourus founded Hoosier Bard Productions, the performance arm of the New Oxford Shakespeare. Young Hamlet, Hoosier Bard’s production of the first edition of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, performed to sold-out houses at the Indianapolis Fringe in February 2011.

"Actors notice things that computers don’t." ~ Gary Taylor

Identifying and authenticating Cardenio‘s fragments is a complicated and time-consuming editorial undertaking, while reconstructing the play’s missing pieces and shaping the fragments into a cohesive whole is a creative and imaginative one. As one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars and an expert on conditions of early modern performance, Gary Taylor is uniquely qualified to bring a new text of The History of Cardenio to modern audiences. A joint general editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare and George Matthew Edgar Professor of English at Florida State University, Dr. Taylor’s scholarly work on Cardenio over the last quarter century has made innovative use of new digital databases, which are crucial to the task of distinguishing fragments of the original play. He has also collaborated on Cardenio with scholars around the world, whose work will be published in a collection of essays forthcoming next year from Oxford University Press; this book will also include an essay by IUPUI’s own Dr. Terri Bourus.

Painting by Ivan Hernandez Olivera, used by permissionPhoto: Painting by Ivan Hernandez Olivera, used by permission

Beginning with a workshop reading in 1992 with the New York Public Theater, Dr. Taylor has actively collaborated with directors and acting companies as he has developed his reconstruction; Hoosier Bard’s production of The History of Cardenio continues the performance-based research Dr. Taylor has conducted with Shakespeare companies including the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the Shakespeare Theater in Washington D.C., the reconstructed Blackfriars Theater in Virginia, the Williamstown Theatre Festival, as well as with commercial producers in New York City, where the work received a table reading with Richard Dreyfuss, Whoopi Goldberg, and Sam Waterston. Of particular assistance in fine-tuning of the script was a recent staged reading of the play in London at Shakespeare’s Globe in November, 2011. Taylor says the Globe workshop opened the door to more discoveries about this play: "Actors notice things that computers don’t." In bringing The History of Cardenio to campus, IUPUI joins Florida State University, one of America’s top-rated theater departments, and Victoria University Wellington in New Zealand, which staged a student production in 2009.

Many people learned about The History of Cardenio in 1986, when Taylor and his collaborators first prominently addressed the issue. Since then, there have been many exaggerated and unsubstantiated attempts to capitalize on “Shakespeare’s lost play”. But the inaugural production of the IUPUI Campus Center theater will be the first to take full account of twenty-five years of scholarly research and twenty years of theatrical experiments. Through a collaborative effort bridging theater and research, Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play will not only celebrate IUPUI’s exciting new facility, but contribute to scholarship across diverse disciplines. A scholarly colloquium, graduate colloquium, and pre-performance lecture series will bring together faculty and students from English, World Languages and Cultures, Africana Studies, Communications, The Moving Company (Physical Education/Dance), Music and Arts Technologies, Law, and Women’s Studies, and the student clubs Hoosier Bard/IUPUI Shakespeare Club, Spanish Conversation Hour, Legal Forum, and Gay-Straight Alliance. Performances of the play will be followed by audience talk-backs featuring the actors, director and writer.

Please join us on April 19, 2012 as we celebrate this brand new approach to Shakespeare, scholarship and theater at IUPUI! Tickets, priced at $10 for students and $20 for general admission, will go on sale in March and may be purchased through the IU Alumni Association.

To view information on Young Hamlet by Hoosier Bard Productions, click here.