Shakespeare, #MeToo and his New Contemporaries

Summary

In 2017, the American Shakespeare Center (ASC) launched an initiative to engage new plays in conversation with Shakespeare’s. Proposed by Jim Warren (ASC co-Founder, with Ralph Alan Cohen) and implemented by Ethan McSweeny (named Artistic Director in 2018), ‘Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries’ promises to debut thirty-eight new plays – one for each of Shakespeare’s thirty-eight – over the next few decades. To date, three ‘New Contemporaries’ have been performed in repertory, with the works that inspired them. In February 2019, during the ASC’s Actors’ Renaissance Season, Amy E. Witting’s Anne Page Hates Fun debuted beside The Merry Wives of Windsor; in May 2019, during the ‘Hand of Time’ Tour Homecoming, Mary Elizabeth Hamilton’s 16 Winters, or The Bear’s Tale played in repertory with The Winter’s Tale; in May 2020, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, Emma Whipday’s Defamation of Cicely Lee debuted as a live-stream reading in consort with a streamed performance of Cymbeline offered under the title of Imogen.