Shakespeare Festival at TCU debuts June 2009

Fort Worth, TX

8/4/2008

The Department of Theatre at Texas Christian University is pleased to announce the June 2009 inaugural season of the Trinity Shakespeare Festival at TCU.  “The mission of the Trinity Shakespeare Festival is to bring a professional summer Shakespeare company back to Tarrant County after a long absence,” said T. J. Walsh, the artistic director of the Trinity Shakespeare Festival and an associate professor in the Department of Theatre.  “We are very excited about starting this new tradition and our hope is that the Trinity Shakespeare Festival will become an integral part of the community during the summer and that eventually it becomes as much a part of the summer in North Texas as the Rangers and the guarantee of sultry days,” he said.

The inaugural season will consist of Shakespeare’s tragic romance, Romeo and Juliet, and his delightful comedy, Twelfth Night, playing during the month of June.  “The plays will run in repertory,” explained Walsh.  “For example, on a Wednesday night, Friday night or Saturday matinee, you can see the company perform Romeo and Juliet and on a subsequent Thursday night, Saturday night or Sunday matinee, you’ll see the same actors perform in Twelfth Night.  This is true repertory theatre in the Elizabethan tradition and is both challenging and exciting to the actors and artists involved and a joy for audiences to see the versatility of their favorite performers from one show to the next.”   

The cast will be professional equity actors in collaboration with TCU student intern actors, to form a professional summer repertory company.  Ticket prices are in the $20 range.

Harry Parker, chairman of the Department of Theatre, will act as managing director of the Trinity Shakespeare Festival.  “We will use both our 200 seat theaters on campus for the repertory,” he said.  “That way audiences will be able to enjoy both a traditional Elizabethan thrust stage in the Marlene and Spencer Hays Theatre in the Walsh Center and the proscenium- styled Jerita Foley Buschman Theatre in Ed Landreth Hall on the TCU campus.   Both are air- conditioned and, in the heat of the Texas summer, we feel it will make enjoying Shakespeare that much more pleasant.”

The new Festival is made possible by a generous Vision In Action grant from the university, which will largely underwrite the Festival for the first two years, following which private funding will be sought.  The Festival plans to have occasional pre-show meals available in the new Brown-Lupton University Union, and traditional outdoor pre-show and after-show events to take advantage of the warm nights of June on the beautiful grounds of Texas Christian University.

For more information, contact T. J. Walsh or Harry Parker at 817-257-7625.