WillPower!

Montgomery College Festival Offers
Workshops, Lectures, Romeo and Juliet

WillPower!, Montgomery College's Annual Shakespeare Festival in Maryland, returns this spring with the National Players touring production of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and a full week's worth of workshop leaders, guest artists, and lecturers.

The college's Rockville campus will feature the majority of events April 1–5, including Romeo and Juliet at the campus's Theatre Arts Arena on Thursday, April 4 at 7 p.m. Other events are scheduled for the Germantown and Takoma Park campuses.

Admission for Romeo and Juliet and all WillPower! events is free and open to the public.

WillPower! also features its annual Adrian Webber Memorial Lecture, with this year's presentation on “Becoming Juliet” given by Dr. Gerard Passannante, associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. His talk will use the figure of Juliet to discuss more broadly the idea of “transforming” and “becoming” in Shakespeare, examining how it is that we can know the inner life of a character simply by observing “two hours' traffic” upon the stage.

Additional lectures and workshops will be presented by faculty and faculty emeriti of Montgomery College including Professor Stephen Bess, Professor Genevieve Carminati, Professor Swift Dickison, Dr. Barbara Hoberman, Professor Sasha Olinick, Dr. Deborah Stearns, and Dr. Bill Soderberg.

Guest artists and master teachers this year are members of Maryland Shakespeare Festival, Taffety Punk Theatre Company, Vulcan's Forge, and Faction of Fools.

Support for WillPower! is provided by The Webber Family Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Fine, Performing, and Visual Arts and the Humanities.

Click here for a PDF of the schedule.

March 27, 2013

If you have Shakespearean news to share, e-mail editorial@shakespeareances.com