ShakesQueer

After leading two plucky quartets on a comic bar crawl for the Bard in last season’s ShakesBeer and ShakesBeer II, director/adaptor Dustin Britt calls ShakesQueer, his latest collection of Stratfordian second takes, “a game of what-ifs.” This compendium not only examines queer subtexts in likely places (including the cross-gender hijinks in As You Like It and Shakespeare’s twentieth sonnet), it also poses an intriguing series of what-ifs elsewhere to see how they change the way we look at familiar texts. For example, if Romeo had been a woman, two influential Verona families would have had another reason altogether in keeping their children apart. “It becomes a very different conversation, without changing a word of the text,” Britt notes. Singer-songwriter Al Riggs hosts an evening in which ten actors reconsider passages from Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a benefit for Bare Theatre’s upcoming season, which will be revealed that night on stage.