CURRENT PRODUCTION

Tickets are now on sale for Anna Karenina Lives! a new play by Germaine Shames that sees Mae West (the Mae West), and Sophia Tolstoy travel through space and time to save Anna from being crushed by the patriarchal powers of the 19th century (and also a train)! Directed by Bad Quarto Productions' artistic director Tony Tambasco, Anna Karenina Lives! tackles important questions about who canonical texts belong to and the ways we read them in the 21st century with song, dance, and Mae West's breezy sexuality and vaudeville sensibilities.

Bad Quarto Productions is committed to developing a better understanding of the work of William Shakespeare by shedding a light on the dingy corners of Shakespearean text. We do this especially by performing the rarely done plays of the English Renaissance using the staging conditions available to an early modern playing company.

This means performing both the lesser known versions of Shakespeare's plays (like the 1594 quarto The Taming of a Shrew and the earliest printed version of Hamlet alongside the works of other writers that shared the stage, like the anonymous 1608 play The Merry Devil of Edmonton and the early Beaumont and Fletcher play Cupid's Revenge.

We also perform new plays and modern plays (because new plays and contemporary works were a prominent feature of the early modern stage) using Shakespeare-esque staging conditions to help us better understand these plays, and the nature of theatre: both Shakespeare's and our own.

Bad Quarto Productions is proud to be a member of The Shakespeare Theatre Association and The Indie Theater Fund

Bad Quarto Productions is proud of our accomplishments, and the impact we're able to create in the worlds of scholarship and performance of Shakespearean plays. Some of these include...

The first peformances of The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The Life and Death of Jack Straw, and Cupid's Revenge in hundreds of years.
Advancing the work of scholars such as Tiffany Stern to include the application to modern plays (see this impact statement from The University of Oxford for more info).
Inspiring a line of inquiry at a major international Shakespeare conference.