Announcing Our 2023-24 Season!
Actors’ Shakespeare Project is proud to announce our 2023-24 Season!
ASP returned to the stage after COVID-19 in September 2021. Since then, we have staged five dynamic productions at four different venues and had incredible ups and downs — from postponing an entire run of a show to one of our best-selling shows of all-time.
But we aren’t ones to rest on our laurels. Rather than play it safe in this new theatre landscape, we are ready to entertain, challenge, and inspire audiences around Boston with our biggest and most audacious season yet.
We here at ASP are proud to announce our 2023-24 Season below with four exciting titles — two from titans of the American canon, and two from The Bard himself. Performance dates and venues will be announced later this spring.
Of course, we can’t do it without you. Due to inflation and rising production costs, ASP will be raising our ticket prices this year to meet demand. But when you subscribe today for next season, you lock in this season’s prices and almost double your savings.
Read more about our season lineup, and then subscribe today for some of Boston’s best theatre at the best prices. Thanks — we’ll see you at the theatre!
Sometimes, you tame the Shrew. Sometimes… the Shrew tames you.
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Christopher V. Edwards
September 15 – Oct 1 at The Modern Theatre
Actors’ Shakespeare Project kicks off our 2023-24 Season by tackling one of the most controversial entries in Shakespeare’s canon – The Taming of the Shrew.
After a long night of drinking, disruption, and harassing barmaids, Christopher Sly finds himself trapped in the worst of predicaments: a stage play. Thrown into the role of “The Shrew”, he tumbles headfirst into a world of witty wordplay, leering suitors, and the full force of the oppressive patriarchy. As the rest of the all-female/non-binary ensemble constructs the zany world of Padua around him, will Sly learn the error of his ways?
Artistic Director Christopher V. Edwards and this talented cast will turn The Taming of the Shrew inside out, flip it upside down, and stretch it to its limits in the way that only ASP can – to find what truly sits at the heart of this contentious comedy.
Check your mirrors, place your hands at ten-and-two, and experience one of the greatest American plays ever written.
by Paula Vogel
Directed by Elaine Vaan Hogue
November 3 – 25 in the Roberts Studio Theatre at the Calderwood Pavilion
Actors’ Shakespeare Project continues our American Bards series with a title from one of the greatest living American playwrights: Paula Vogel.
Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and nominated for the 2022 Tony Award for Best Revival, How I Learned To Drive puts us behind the wheel of a ‘56 Chevy with our protagonist, Li’l Bit, as she looks back on her rocky journey from adolescence to adulthood. Fasten your seatbelts as she navigates dark family secrets, teenage growing pains, and her turbulent relationship with her Uncle Peck.
Named “One of the Top 25 American Plays Since Angels in America” by The New York Times, How I Learned To Drive traverses the full range of human emotions – from hilarity to heartbreak. Vogel’s examination of the highway towards womanhood has only taken on more urgency and meaning since it was first staged.
Nearly forty years after the blues of Seven Guitars, the American Shakespeare takes on the Reagan Era.
Directed by Summer L. Williams
In Partnership with Hibernian Hall
March 8 – 31 at Hibernian Hall
Following one of ASP’s most acclaimed and successful productions of all-time, Seven Guitars, Actors’ Shakespeare Project returns in 2024 for another installment in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle: King Hedley II.
Fresh off of a seven-year stint in prison, King Hedley II (named after his father, who was played by Johnnie Mack in ASP’s Seven Guitars) dreams of going straight. He’s going to open his own video store — even if he has to steal every refrigerator in Pittsburgh to make it happen. Returning home to the Hill District in 1985, King finds that his community is beset by violence, con men, and redlining. As King fights to keep his family afloat, the harsh realities of Reagan’s America threaten to drag him under.
Hailed by Variety in 1999 as “maybe the most passionate work that August Wilson has penned to date,” King Hedley II dives into family tensions and the Black experience in America with Wilson’s signature poeticism and power.
Two Households. Star-Crossed Lovers. Violent Delights. All Done ASP Style.
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Marianna Bassham
May 10 – June 2 in the Roberts Studio Theatre at the Calderwood Pavilion
Actors’ Shakespeare Project finishes off our 2023-24 Season with a classic that hasn’t graced our mainstage in over a decade: Romeo & Juliet.
Shakespeare’s most famous duo return in a flurry of forbidden love, exhilarating fight scenes, and (spoiler alert) tragic fate. Brought to life by Resident Acting Company Member Marianna Bassham’s expert direction, this dynamic and vivid take on Romeo & Juliet will thrill even those who fell asleep reading it in Sophomore English class.
ASP will be working with Boston-area youth and teachers during this production to explore the themes of youth violence and alienation in the play, and how they can still ring true in 2024.