RSC Takes a Bite Out of the Big Apple???

As part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 50th anniversary next year, it will perform a six week, five play residency at New York’s historic Park Avenue Armory as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

The current 44-member ensemble will perform five Shakepeare plays chosen from the 2009 and 2010 repertoire – Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale. Performances will be staged on a full-scale replica of the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre, which is due to open later this year.

RSC artistic director Michael Boyd said: “Collaboration lies at the heart of everything we do at the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is why I am so pleased that we are able to work with such great partners to bring the culmination of three years’ work in the UK to New York … Our thrust stage, wrapping the audience around the action, allows people to reach out to our actors and to each other in a space which is both intimate and powerful.”

“I would like to thank both US and UK Equity for their support. And finally, I am also excited by our continuing partnership with The Ohio State University and their commitment to this residency, as well as the opportunity to work with US teachers and teaching artists to ignite the imagination of young Americans through theater, which speaks to the human dilemmas of today.”