Will Power 2

The Vortex Theatre’s 2011 Summer Shakespeare Festival

June 3 through August 7, 2011

This year’s edition of “Will Power” will feature a comedy, a tragedy, and one of Shakespeare’s most probing social dramas: The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice. The three plays will be presented over ten weeks in revolving repertory, four performances per weekend. See the attached schedule for details. And the 2011 festival will feature more events. Albuquerque’s Blackout Theatre will present late-night Shakespeare improv shows. Pre-show speakers will prepare interested spectators for the plays to follow. And special post-show events will include talk-back discussions with the directors and actors as well as panels and presentations on special topics of interest to Shakespeare fans. The first “Will Power” festival, during the summer of 2010, featured three great Shakespearean comedies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, and The Taming of the Shrew. Reviews were enthusiastic. Audiences laughed and admired. And most performances were sold out. Stay tuned to our website for details on how you can buy tickets for the 2011 shows. Ticket prices will be $15 general admission, $10 for students, with special “Festival Passes” offering admission to all three productions for $40. The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays and one of his most popular comedies. It is a fast-paced farce involving mistaken identities and two sets of twins—identical masters and their identical servants. The high jinks begin as soon as all four twins wind up in the same city, and everything goes down hill from there. Puns, word play, and slapstick! Accusations of infidelity, theft, madness, and demonic possession! And a great scene describing what could be called the ugliest woman in the world. John Hardman has been involved with the Albuquerque theatre scene for over thirty years. He has directed, acted, and built shows for The Vortex, Albuquerque Little Theatre, Adobe Theatre, and Mother Road. A veteran actor in theatre and film, he was most recently seen as Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing at The Vortex during the 2010 summer “Will Power” festival. The Merchant of Venice is a classic work about prejudice—as its heroine says, how it corrodes the soul of both he who hates and he who is hated. Shakespeare asks us to consider what blind prejudices we harbor and at what cost to ourselves and those around us.  No heroes, no villains, only human beings dramatically caught in their biases and hatreds, struggling to deal with consequences and escape.  A great play for our time and a gripping night in the theatre.   Peter Shea Kierst has been directing at The Vortex since his production of Death of a Salesman in 1978.  In later years he directed Richard III, The Importance of Being Earnest, Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning, and Good Evening (by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore).  Most recently, he directed the theatre's productions of Hamlet (2006) and Antigone (2009).  He was Artistic Director of The Vortex from 1981-1983.  Romeo and Juliet is among Shakespeare’s most popular plays because it is the most famous love tragedy ever written. The “Will Power 2” production will have a special appeal because of its setting: a post-apocalyptic world where the troubles of love are echoed by a civilization in violent collapse. Think Terminator Salvation and The Book of Eli but with Shakespeare’s gorgeous verse and the passions of young love. Ryan Jason Cook received his BFA in Theatre Performance from Eastern New Mexico University in 2005. After a short time in Los Angeles, he returned to Albuquerque where he performed in nineteen productions in a two-year span, most recently as Theseus/Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the 2010 “Will Power” festival. In these same years, he has acted in dozen film or television productions and produced or directed numerous shows through his own company, RyBan Productions.