Haunting and hilarious, Shakespeare in Mind takes a strange and wondrous trip

through a dozen "post-modern Elizabethan" plays, poems and songs. Motifs of

fear and murder, love and death, dreams and destiny weave in and out of our
modern minds that Shakespeare now inhabits. And just like Will's own plays, this
dynamic production interweaves comedy, romance, song and tragedy as it
presents contemporary characters interacting with Macbeth and Duncan, Juliet
and Titus Andronicus, Othello and Desdemona, and 20 other classic characters.
The production opens with Elizabeth Wong's Shakespeare's Brainscan, which
uses the many murders in Titus Andronicus to demonstrate how our brains
respond to fear and horror. Playwrights Brooke Jennett and Mollie LaFavers offer
a contemporary romance that recalls the lyrical love of Shakespeare's star-
crossed lovers. Richard Dresser's Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow &
Today updates the violence in Macbeth for bloodthirsty audiences of today. Spit
Spat Spite Splendor by Ginna Hoben pushes six pairs of Shakespeare's famous
lovers down a slippery slope from ecstasy to enmity, ending with a ferocious food
fight accompanied by a romantic ballad written by Janet Allard and composed by
Niko Tsakalakos. Poet Jeremy Paden illuminates the tragedy of Othello by
placing it in the context of seafaring explorers of the 16th century, and Jon Jory
questions the cause of recent wars by riffing on Juliet's famous soliloquy, "What's
in a name?" All this and more is channel-surfed by a trio of characters who
discuss the relevance of Hamlet while comparing it to Game of Thrones in
Valerie Smith's Gogglebox Hamlet. Iago's motives and methods are lampooned
in Dean Staley's wacky Iago on the Bus. A woman confesses to the murders in
Shakespeare's plays in Justin Wright's unnerving monologue, Chivalry. Another
woman can't escape the threats of her husband, who thinks he's Othello and
she's Desdemona … until she turns the tables by reimagining herself as Lady
Macbeth! And Constance Congdon places it all in perspective through a series of
conversations between a young Will Shakespeare and the ghost of Christopher
Marlowe. Together these works celebrate and reimagine the theatrical universe
of the Bard for a technology-driven 21st-century audience.