Taking Shakespeare

charming, funny, poignant...Murrell's writing as always was excellent...

The first new play in a dozen years from Canadian dramatist, translator, and librettist John Murrell, Taking Shakespeare is the eccentric and compassionate story of an extremely unlikely threesome:
Prof is sixty-seven years old, stuck in a job he hates at a small university where he has remained for far too long. The only universe in which he travels happily is literature. His only close friend is William Shakespeare.
Murph is twenty-four years old, out of focus, lost in his life. He's never traveled anywhere happily, and he's never had a really close friend.
William Shakespeare is four hundred and fifty years old, an icon of art and humanity, with hundreds of millions of admirers and students, and with friends everywhere.
Shakespeare is the agent who brings Murph and Prof together, introduces them, and propels them through a few explosive tutoring sessions that will shake up both their lives forever. Through real-life comedy, real-life tragedy, and an intense hunger for human understanding -- above all, through Shakespeare's powerful realities -- Murph and Prof will transcend the borders of age, education, and isolation, to discover connections, disconnections, needs, and consolations which all three of them share with the rest of us.

CREW

Written By: John Murrell
Directed By: Blake Brooker
Lighting Design By: Sandi Somers
Set and Costume By: Fiona Kennedy
Sound Design By: Richard McDowell
Stage Manager: Oliver Armstrong

CAST

John Murrell: Prof
Denise Clarke: Murph