Shakespeare & Company, Inc.

Lenox, MA -  Shakespeare & Company Artistic Director Tony Simotes announces the lineup for the Company’s ambitious, exhilarating, and revolutionary 35th Anniversary Season.

Founders’ Theatre:  The Company’s 413-seat Mainstage hosts four shows for its 2012 summer season: The Tempest, directed by Simotes and starring Academy Award-winning actress Olympia Dukakis as Prospero; her brother Apollo Dukakis, who plays Gonzalo; Rocco Sisto, who reinvents his Caliban (this three-time OBIE Award-winner and S&Co. founding member played Caliban in a past production at S&Co.); and Kristin Wold, who will reprise her role as Ariel which she played here in 2001. OBIE Award-winner John Douglas Thompson returns to the Company in a new one-man show titled Satchmo at the Waldorf. This production marks the Northeast premiere of famed drama critic and award-winning writer Terry Teachout’s fascinating, provocative, and most definitive play about musician Louis Armstrong. King Lear, Shakespeare’s timeless familial drama about a misguided monarch and his descent into madness, is directed by Rebecca Holderness and stars Founding Member and Director of Training Dennis Krausnick, with Apollo Dukakis playing Gloucester and Kevin G. Coleman reprising his critically acclaimed performance of the Fool, who he portrayed in 2003. This is the second production of King Lear at S&Co. in the Company’s 35-year history, and one that will stand alongside the Company’s other touted productions of Shakespeare’s classic tragedies. Krausnick directed Olympia Dukakis as Lear in the Company’s 1998 production of The Lear Project. Rounding out the Founders’ season is the enigmatic time warp Endurance, a true collaborative effort between S&Co. and the collective imagination of the Split Knuckle Theatre and its founder, Michael F. Toomey. Endurance, starring Toomey, transcends time and space to make a larger statement about human desperation and the will to survive as it parallels Shackelton’s adventures with contemporary business world.

The Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre: The 197-seat theatre and part of the Bernstein Center for the Performing Arts will once again offer a lineup of engaging and provocative voices with The Allergists Wife, featuring Elliot Norton award-winning actress Annette Miller (Martha Mitchell Calling, Full Gallop, Golda’s Balcony, Richard III) in the lead role, and Norman Plotkin’s beautifully crafted one-woman play, Cassandra Speaks, starring Tod Randolph (As You Like It, Richard III, director of The Dreamer Examines His Pillow) as she pays tribute to the late Dorothy Thompson, the controversial American journalist and radio broadcaster, who gave her voice to many major events of the 20th century. Following on its heels will be the East Coast premiere of Mark Roberts' edgy dark comedy, Parasite Drag. Robert’s hard hitting tragic-comedy about a family’s reconciliation in the wake of an untimely death features Jason Asprey (The Memory of Water, Hamlet, King Lear) and yet another Elliot Norton award-winner, Elizabeth Aspenlieder (The Memory of Water, The Winter’s Tale, Bad Dates). Parasite Drag had a staged reading in the Company’s popular Studio Festival last September.

Shakespeare & Company also welcomes back many of its Founding Members, who will be involved not only in the 35th Anniversary Celebration on June 30, but many other special events all season long. Guest artists include voice teacher Kristen Linklater, choreographer Susan Dibble, and fight director B.H. Barry, for an engaging and insightful lecture series, as they look back at the early days of the Company and how they helped shape their current, thriving theatre careers. This season will also feature several veteran S&Co. actors, designers and directors, including actors Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Jason Asprey, Kevin G. Coleman, Jonathan Croy, Jonathan Epstein, Malcolm Ingram, Annette Miller, and Tod Randolph. Costume Designers Arthur Oliver, Govane Lohbauer and sound designers and composers Scott Killian and Bill Barclay, as well as set designers Patrick Brennan and Sandra Goldmark, and many other Company favorites will be on hand to celebrate the 35th Anniversary.