About This Show

The First Look Festival is a unique opportunity for theater-goers to get a preview of the projects and artists CSC will be developing over the course of the season. This season’s festival takes a guided tour through the gallery of rogues, villains, and moral miscreants of Elizabethan Drama.

Tony Award winner Ron Liebman in a Staged Reading of The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe.
Directed by Artistic Director Brian Kulick
Wednesday, October 1 @ 8pm
Before Shakespeare’s Shylock there was Marlowe’s Barabas, who shares Shylock’s faith but takes his penchant for revenge to gleefully unadulterated heights. This dark comic masterpiece is replete with poison, murder, mayhem, and even a vat of boiling oil!

Academy Award winner Frances McDormand in a Staged Reading of Arden of Faversham, by Anonymous
Directed by Erica Schmidt
Friday, October 3 @ 8pm
Imagine pulp fiction writer James M. Cain transported back into the English Renaissance and you just might begin to get the gist of this stark drama, a veritable Elizabethan “Double Indemnity.” Torn from the news headlines of the time, this remarkable work recounts a wife and her lover’s cold blooded plot to murder her husband.

Academy Award Winner F. Murray Abraham in a Staged Reading of Volpone, by Ben Jonson
Directed by Michael Sexton
Wednesday, October 8 @ 8pm
Vice, greed, and a healthy dose of iniquity are all on glorious display as Volpone, conman extraordinaire, is out to fleece the world one sucker at a time. No one escapes unscathed in this uproarious satire that presents men as beasts, with the greed of swine and the rapacity of wolves.

John Turturro stars in a Workshop Production of Richard III, by William Shakespeare
Directed by Barry Edelstein
October 10, 11 @ 8pm; October 12 @ 3pm
No gallery of rogues and villains would be complete without one of literature’s greatest villains of all time: Richard III. The original man we love to hate, whose winter of discontent has been a theatrical boon for countless generations of theater-goers and artists alike.

Show Details

Dates: Opening Night: October 1, 2003 Final Performance: October 12, 2003