Red Bull Theater

The Knight of the Burning Pestle

The Knight of the Burning Pestle

Fiasco Theater, in a joint production with Red Bull Theater, takes on Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, which was a flop when it premiered in 1607. Though it has been occasionally revived, the play is mostly of scholarly interest: Beaumont is best-known for his collaborations with John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as writer-in-residence of the King’s Men, but The Knight of the Burning Pestle is Beaumont’s only play written alone. If the comedy doesn’t offer up the richness or complexity of Shakespeare, Fiasco is clearly drawn to its story of topsy-turvy community-building through theater.

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Arden of Faversham

Arden of Faversham

The anonymously written 1592 play Arden of Faversham is just the sort of thing that Red Bull Theater specializes in: plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries that have been overshadowed by the Bard. But even the best of Shakespeare needs pruning, and Arden has received a new adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher and Kathryn Walat for artistic director Jesse Berger’s production. The result is a mixed bag: necessary condensation of characters and cutting obscure lines, but also some wholesale rewriting.

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The Alchemist

The Alchemist

The Red Bull Theater Company was founded in 2003 to present the talented playwrights of Shakespeare’s time who have been overshadowed by the Bard and bring their plays to new audiences. Among its productions have been The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley), Women Beware Women (Middleton alone) and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford), as well as the occasional Shakespeare. In the years since, the mission has evolved into “classics” outside the 17th century as well—the company’s The Government Inspector, a Nikolai Gogol play of 1836, was one of its most exhilarating triumphs. Now Jeffrey Hatcher, who adapted the Gogol, has given an assist to Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.

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American Moor

American Moor

Keith Hamilton Cobb has written a thrilling part for himself in American Moor, a powerful look at Shakespeare, Othello, and the plight of black actors trying to pursue their craft with honesty. Cobb himself stars, although his character in the script is called the Actor. The play arrives at a moment when race and white privilege dominate the zeitgeist. Some of the material is familiar, but much is unique and insightful.

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Mac Beth

Mac Beth

Red Bull Theater’s new production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth—restyled Mac Beth and originally staged at the Seattle Repertory Theatre—is an exciting theatrical experience that injects fresh energy and immediacy into the oft-performed and oft-read play. It strikes a good balance between faithfulness and innovation, and its central conceit never feels like an interpretive fad or a new-for-the-sake-of-new device.

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The White Devil

The White Devil

The Red Bull Theater, founded in 2003 to focus on Jacobean drama (those English playwrights who were overshadowed by Shakespeare) has in recent seasons been incorporating non-Jacobean plays into its offerings, so it’s a pleasure to see the company back on home ground with John Webster’s potboiler The White Devil. Webster is best known for The Duchess of Malfi, perhaps the greatest non-Shakespearean play of the period; The White Devil’s complex plot is inspired by the same Italian family.

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The Metromaniacs

The Metromaniacs

The Metromaniacs is an adaptation of an obscure play from 1738 called La Métromanie, written by Alexis Piron—a poet who failed to make it in to the acclaimed Académie Française due to the lewd content of some of his writing. The production by the Red Bull Theater Company, however, is credited primarily to David Ives, who writes in the program note: “The Metromaniacs is a comedy with five plots, none of them important.” That sums up the one hour-and-45-minute farce and is also what makes the play so delightful. It is a classic comedy of mistaken identity, love at first sight, and, well, absolute fluff. 

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