The Faithful Shepherdess
Coming: November 21-23, 2024
Columbus Performing Arts Center (549 Franklin Ave)
image credit: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 'The Shepherdess' (1889)
John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess
Though he is largely unknown to audiences today, John Fletcher was one of the most popular and successful playwrights of the English Renaissance. He took over from Shakespeare as the principal playwright of the King’s Men playing company, jointly writing three plays with Shakespeare at the end of the latter’s career between 1610-1612. The Faithful Shepherdess is among Fletcher’s earliest work, and it displays Fletcher’s close study of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances, particularly the characterization and setting of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fletcher’s dramaturgical style often involves exaggeration or amplification of another writer’s work; for example, whereas Dream has two pairs of lovers lost at night in the woods, Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess has four, and whereas Dream offers the magical figures of diminutive English fairies, Fletcher supplies robust satyrs and river gods.
The Faithful Shepherdess, Lord Denney’s Players’ twelfth production, offers Columbus audiences a lively, absurd expansion of the Shakespearean tropes they know and love, such as young people’s obsessive sexuality and feeling (seen also in Romeo and Juliet) and the peculiar deus ex machina of a late work like Cymbeline. The premiere example of Jacobean tragicomedy, the play balances on a knife edge between genres while also offering such a robust satire of puritanical values that one reader has called it “American Pie set in the seventeenth century.”
Here are important information regarding auditions, rehearsals, and show run:
Open table read of The Faithful Shepherdess will occur in Denney Hall 311, Sept 3, 2024, from 6-9pm.
Auditions for The Faithful Shepherdess will occur in Denney Hall 311, Sept 10 and 11, 2024, from 5-8pm.
Callbacks for The Faithful Shepherdess will occur in Denney Hall 311, Sept 12, 2024, from 6:15-9pm
Rehearsals for The Faithful Shepherdess will occur in Meiling Hall 112 (Medical Campus), Sept 23-Nov 17, 2024. Rehearsals are Monday-Thursday, 7-10pm; Sundays 1-4pm (not every actor needs to be at every rehearsal).
Tech week: November 18-20, 2024, 6-10pm, Columbus Performing Arts Center (549 Franklin Ave)
Show run: November 21-23, 2024 (3 shows total), call 6pm, Columbus Performing Arts Center (549 Franklin Ave)