Foul Contending Rebels Theatre Co. Present William Shakespeare's Shrew

1000 Dorset Street,South Burlington VT 05403

26 August, 2022

Description

LUCENTIO: Faith, he is gone unto the taming-school. BIANCA: The taming-school! what, is there such a place? TRANIO: Ay, mistress, and Petruchio is the master; That teacheth tricks eleven and twenty long, To tame a shrew and charm her chattering tongue. -SHREW, Act IV, Scene 3. The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy about an unstoppable force meeting an unmovable object: when the eager-to-wed Petruchio meets the stubborn Katerina, he domesticates his wild wife, and they learn to live together in harmony. In doing so, he teaches his peers a thing or two about how to deal with difficult women. That is not the story we’ll be telling. Shrew is a tragedy about the death of women’s autonomy within an oppressive patriarchal system, about the cold and capitalist purchasing of wives, and about the establishment of Petruchio’s “taming school,” celebrated above by Tranio and Lucentio. Our Shrew will not suggest a “correct” way for people who hold marginalized gender identities to behave. Many productions of The Taming of the Shrew either criticize Bianca or Katherine, two sisters with opposite personalities. The implication is that women are either too aggressive, or too docile. A goal in our production is to, instead, encourage women to embrace a wide range of responses to patriarchal structures. Consequently, our focus in Katherine and Bianca’s story will be on them as sisters who have been made strangers, rather than rivals. Please scroll to the bottom of this page for applicable content disclosures. THIS PRODUCTION IS PRESENTED IN COLLABORATION WITH THE PRIDE CENTER OF VERMONT’S SAFESPACE ANTI-VIOLENCE PROGRAM A portion of our ticket sales will be donated to the SafeSpace program. Tickets for performances at Veterans Park are for sale on a sliding scale. Pay what you can! Creative Team Producer/Choreographer - Carolyne Sandoval Director - Emily Thibodeau Dramaturg - Ellie Guyon SafeSpace Consultant - Kim Jordan* Production Stage Manager/COVID-19 Compliance Officer - Katelyn Paddock Assistant Stage Manager/Rehearsal Photographer - Olive Cotton* Costume Designer - Halina Vercessi-Clarke* Asst. Costume Designer - Carley Rembish* Sound Designer - Bastien Gliech* Marketing Director - Celeste Piette Stagehand: Orin Paxton* Cast Katherine - Jo Fox Bianca - Amelia Mason* Petruchio - Harley Winzenried Baptista - Dara Pohl Feldman* Hortensio - Grace Callahan Gremio - Tove Wood Lucentio - Charlotte Looby Tranio - Nora June Tetrick* Grumio - Mary Rath* Biondello - Celeste Piette Christopher Sly - Eamon Lynch The Lord - Wyatt Adams* *Denotes first production with FCR! Questions? Email [email protected] with “Shrew Question” in the subject line. Content Disclosure: The Taming of the Shrew depicts several moments of misogyny, intimate partner violence (IPV), and verbal/physical abuse. In order to make this show as safe a space as possible for those working on it and those in the audience, here are the steps that FCR will take: Employing a consent-based approach to the staging of any combat or intimate scenes, based on the practices developed by Chelsea Pace and her team at Theatrical Intimacy Education (read her book Staging Sex or visit www.theatricalintimacyed.com to learn more) Using abstract movement sequences to represent certain acts of physical violence without literal depictions. Using appropriate content disclosures in all marketing materials related to the production. Including resources for victims of IPV in our program.