Cardenio

Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and playwright Charles Mee (author of Full Circle, Snow in June, and bobrauschenbergamerica) have joined forces to produce a midsummer comedy of love based on Cardenio, a play by Shakespeare that was lost soon after its first performance. Fragments survive, which Greenblatt and Mee have woven into a contemporary reconstruction of the story, now set at a wedding party on the terrace of a villa in the Umbrian hills. Shakespeare’s fingerprints are all over this sparkling new version, from the crisscrossing of suspicious lovers to a cunning Iago-like meddler, from soliloquies (re-imagined as wedding toasts) to overheard conversation, from the dream of passion to the pleasures of music and dance.