Anthem Theatre Company’s Shakespeare Double Feature

Recently Salt Lily Magazine sat down with Caitlin Laurie Bell and Laurel Mayer of Anthem Theatre Company to discuss their latest project entitled Shakespeare Double Feature. In this new take on some of William Shakespeare’s classics, the audience had the opportunity to get lost in A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream in drag. The show is then followed by a gender-bending 70’s rock-inspired Hamlet. The talented young cast and the creative team truly reinvented these all too familiar stories and succeeded in creating a fabulous queer spectacle, where even people who hate Shakespeare could, well…rock out to Shakespeare! Caitlin, the company’s executive director, put it best saying, “Shakespeare is not this big convoluted thing with tights and puffy pants, it’s about people and human stories.”

In A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, four young Athenian lovers are controlled and manipulated by fairies who inhabit the forest in which the play is set. Only this time the lovers are a gay and lesbian couple thrown into a jaw-dropping drag show full of magic, glitter, and glam. When watching this interpretation, it’s impressive how well the texts lends itself to the theme. It’s almost like it was written that way. It’s just so…gay. Mid-Summer is then followed by Hamlet, a tale we all know well. Where a young prince is set on revenge against his uncle who has murdered the prince’s father to seize the throne. But by changing the gender of some of the key characters there are so many new dynamics we the audience get to explore. In both shows, by approaching the text through a queer lens, Anthem refreshingly threw typecasting out the window. By allowing any actor to play any role they enhanced their overarching concept that Shakespeare is for everyone.

Anthem does Shakespeare for the modern audience. But as a company, they are interested in more than just the Bard. In the future, they hope to do more Shakespeare along with Original works. They aim to create more accessibility to the art community. Laurel the executive producer says, “we eventually want to seek out new writers and give new play writes a space to perform their work. Becoming an entity that creates an opportunity for other people would just be amazing.” Caitlin states that “Anthem is about passion and accessibility. It’s just something people can come and enjoy. It’s about sharing art with the world.”