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“Pericles turns out to have been a strangely apt one for me. When I got inside it, I was humbled and moved by it far beyond what I had anticipated. The power of the final recognition scenes hit me the hardest, particularly the scene that Shakespeare seems to have built the play to hold: the recognition scene between Marina and Pericles, when Pericles encounters the strange and unflappable girl that neither knows is his own daughter. This is Shakespeare at his most sublime, and it was a lovely challenge to meet him in the beauty of his language and try to do right by him.” Ellen McLaughlin, Playwright
Playwright
Ellen McLaughlin
Ellen McLaughlin is an award-winning playwright and actor. Her plays include Tongue of a Bird, A Narrow Bed, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Trojan Women, Infinity’s House, Helen, The Persians, Oedipus, Ajax in Iraq, Kissing the Floor, Septimus and Clarissa, Pericles and Penelope. Her work has been performed in New York Off-Broadway and regionally as well as overseas. Producers include The Public Theater, National Actors’ Theater, Classic Stage Co., New York Theater Workshop, The Guthrie, The Intiman, The Mark Taper Forum, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actors’ Theater of Louisville, and The Almeida Theater in London. Among her honors are the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. Her Trojan Women was nominated for a 2017 Drama Desk Award for Best Adaptation.
She has taught playwrighting at Barnard College since 1995. Other teaching posts include Princeton University and Yale School of Drama.
As an actor, she is most well known for having originated the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, appearing in all workshops and productions of the play through its Broadway original run.
Dramaturg
Alan Armstrong
Alan Armstrong began working as a production dramaturg for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2005. His Shakespeare credits there include shows directed by John Sipes (King John, Henry VIII), Laird Williamson (Coriolanus), Penny Metropulos (Henry IV Part One), Lisa Peterson (Henry IV Part Two), Joseph Haj (Henry V, Pericles), Lileana Blain-Cruz (Henry IV Part One), Carl Cofield (Henry IV Part Two), and Rosa Joshi (Henry V, As You Like It). He was also dramaturg for OSF’s world premiere of Great Expectations and literary consultant for Wit.
Armstrong earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University. He founded and for two decades directed the Southern Oregon University Center for Shakespeare Studies. His writing has focused on the staging of Shakespeare’s plays, both then and now. He is co-author of Oregon Shakespeare Festival Actors: Telling the Story and author of numerous articles on textual evidence for doubling in original performances of Shakespeare. For many years, he co-edited the international journal Literature and History and reviewed plays for Shakespeare Bulletin.
In Print
Pericles
The heroic story of Pericles adapted for new audiences by Ellen McLaughlin.
Shakespeare’s romance Pericles follows Pericles, the Prince of Tyre, on a series of adventures across the Mediterranean Sea. Navigating one heroic challenge after another, Pericles strives to be reunited with his wife and child. Ellen McLaughlin’s translation of Pericles illuminates Shakespeare’s text, untangling syntax and bringing forth the poetry of the verse. An encounter between the contemporary and the iconic, this translation brings the play to life as audiences would have experienced it in Shakespeare’s time.
