Reframing dominant narratives to tell a different story
Enabling BIPOC & LGBTQIA to see ourselves, our languages, and cultures reflected in Shakespeare’s plays
America Shakes is a theater company that restages Shakespeare’s tragedies to take an honest look at some of the tragedies BIPOC and LGBTQIA experience everyday, in the streets, along the border, in the military, and in prisons across the United States of America.
MOORE - a Pacific Island Othello
MOORE - a Pacific Island Othello is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello, set in the Pacific Islands at the crossroads of Race, Language, and American Empire. Directed by Justina Taft Mattos at the University of Hawaii at Hilo’s Performing Arts Center, the live-stream premiere of the production ran for 1 hour and 48 minutes at 2:00 PM and was performed in English, Japanese, Korean, and ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i on November 1st, 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was no physical audience in the theater space. The entire production was filmed incorporating the state of Hawaii’s COVID-19 safety protocols: masks, social distancing, and assigning “Ohana bubbles” to actors having physical contact with each other. With the impending 2020 presidential election, rising social unrest, and our present reckoning about systemic racism in the United States, we felt it was high time to revisit Othello and examine what the play has to say, here in America, on the 416th anniversary of the first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s play.
Marqués - a Narco Macbeth
Marqués, is a multimedia bilingual adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, set in the world of Mexico’s narcocartels and the US / Mexican war on drugs. Marqués uses Macbeth as a means to illuminate the life and death struggle currently taking place in México. The waring narco-cartels have been responsible for the deaths of over 165,000 civilians since 2007: twice as many civilian deaths as in Iraq, and over four times as many civilians killed in Afghanistan over the same period of time. The intention behind the play, is to stimulate dialogue, dispel stereotypes, and to promote understanding of one the most significant crises to take place in the hemispheric Americas to date, as well as investigate what it means to digitize and adapt Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a contemporary Mexican context.
Eastside Story
(in production, Los Angeles, CA)
A musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set in East Los Angeles. Eastside Story addresses contemporary issues of Interracial / Transgender Love & Relationships, Police killings of unarmed Black people and Latinos, teen suicide, and the mass incarceration and systemic brown-on-black racism created by the California Department of Corrections.
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Maria - a Telenovela for the Stage
Winner of Chuck Lorre’s Dharma Grace Award in playwriting and the University of California Santa Cruz Humanities Dean’s Award. “More than simply an adaptation of Euripedes’ Medea, this multi-media, transtemporal piece draws on a variety of literary and cultural works, from The Tempest, especially stagings that reverse the gender and race of the characters, to the Latin American telenovela and media imagery of the black body. The result is a striking experiment in linguistic and cultural translation.” – Dr. Susan Gillman
EVE – Dramatists Guild of America SF Footlights
Eve is a meta-theatrical conversation between some of the great works of theatre, film, and literature, employed to speak to present day issues of nationalism, immigration rights, the First Amendment, refugees, an expanding opioid epidemic, and the purpose of the theatre itself. As a hybrid adaptation of the 1950 film All About Eve and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Eve investigates the roles of women, the currency of female youth and beauty, the relationships between mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, political corruption, and the abuse of power. Hosted by the Dramatists Guild of America at The Phoenix Theater in San Francisco
Inside the Blackfriars Theater Cuboid
America Shakes’ Black, Traveling Cuboid, unfolds to create a “Theater of Transformation,” built to the proportions of the monoliths in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a ratio of 1:4:9. Like Kubrick, our decision to incorporate this ratio into the design of our stage and projection surface walls, is a visual and metaphorical gesture to the cinema screen, and to the ongoing conversation within the body of our work between text, theater, and film. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the monoliths gave humankind the evolutionary kick in the pants it needed to survive at the Dawn of Time, vaulting us forward, teaching and inciting us to evolve beyond our violent, hominid origins. Like the monoliths, the Blackfriars Theater Cuboid is also an evolutionary space/time machine. It teaches by making audience members change their perspective and view the events unfolding in the world from a different position than the one they occupy outside our theater doors, observing the world (and themselves) from an “other’s” point of view, up close, face to face, and distant from points of view that distort reality or engender bias, prejudice, and violence.
Meet Will @ the Cuboid
This was A.I. avatar, “BIPOC Will 's” 1st Augmented Reality animation test at the cuboid. Will is your personal AR guide through “worlds elsewhere,” (past, present and future) available to audience members on their smartphones, once inside the Blackfriars Theater Cuboid, offering everything from translation of the original text into modern English, historical contexts, virtual dramaturgical journeys through time to speak with Shakespeare’s interlocutors, adversaries, or those who became famous performing Shakespeare’s works as you explore the theater space before, during intermission, and after the performance. If you’d like, Will can even send you “subtext messages,” to your phone, whenever a transtemporal convergence or flashpoint occurs, unpacking the more nuanced moments on stage , to create an even deeper appreciation for the larger and ongoing conversation with Shakespeare’s works that our production is just one part of, the latest unfolding of the play’s over 420-year afterlife.
Materials for Teachers and Educators
Resources for Teaching Multilingual / Multicultural Adaptation in the Classroom
Publications and Reviews
Scholarship and Reviews written about our work.
” Through the languages spoken, the actors, and the media, that theater space transformed into a contact zone, between the form of the tragedy, the cultural capital of Shakespeare, and a political intervention that is critiquing U.S. / Mexican relations and I’m telling you, people were shaken up by it when they walked out of that building.”
— Dr. Juan Poblete
Contact
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
Email
americashakes1@gmail.com
Phone
(808) 658-1914