Edward II

Directed and adapted by company member Elizabeth Christine Tanner with original music from Jon Steinhagen (The Teapot Scandals), Bertolt Brecht’s Edward II examines the life of a king forced to choose between his throne and his one true love. The play offers an intense and swiftly moving account of a weak man controlled by his basest passions, a man who becomes a puppet to his homosexual lover and pays a tragic price for forsaking the governance of his country.

The action takes place in early fourteenth-century England, during a period when the country was surrounded by enemies in Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, and France. Edward, preoccupied by the banishment of his lover, Gaveston, barely acknowledges the nascent crises that threaten his realm; he indulges his passions and abdicates his duties, failing to recognize that his willful and persistent refusal to attend to state affairs is eroding his royal authority.