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“To return to Twelfth Night, behind the romance and comedy of the play are all-encompassing clouds and rivers of death-inspired grief. But the characters fight on, grab onto what they need to stay breathing and afloat, and rebuild their lives. They imagine something better and bring it into being.” Alison Carey, Playwright
Playwright
Alison Carey
Alison Carey is director of American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s multi-decade program of commissioning and developing 37 new plays about moments of change in United States history. Carey is co-founder of and former resident playwright of Cornerstone Theater Company, which creates work with and for communities, sometimes through adaptations of Shakespeare and other older works. Her work has been produced at venues nationwide, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage, the Public Theater, the Mark Taper Forum, the shuttered mother plant of Bethlehem Steel, and a dirt-floor cattle sale barn.
Dramaturg
Lezlie C. Cross
Lezlie C. Cross is an expert in the text and production of Shakespeare’s plays across time and geography. Currently she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Portland where she directs for the program as well as teaching dramaturgy, playwriting, and theatre history. Her professional dramaturgy work has been seen at regional theatres across America including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Nevada Conservatory Theatre, Cincinnati Shakespeare, Classic Stage Company, and Actor’s Theatre of Louisville. Her published articles and book reviews appear in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Annual, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre and Theatre Survey as well as the book projects The Encyclopedia of Modern Theatre; Women on Stage; Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom and Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. She is an Editorial Board member for Review: The Journal of Dramaturgy and an Advisory Board Member for the Shakespeare and Social Justice Series from Arden Bloomsbury. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, her M.A. from the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, and her B.A. from Whitman College.
In Print
Twelfth Night
Alison Carey brings the confusion and mischief of Shakespeare’s comedy into the twenty-first century.
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night centers on power and love. One of the most perennially produced of Shakespeare’s comedies, it talks about shipwrecked twins, gender-bending romance, and a bumper crop of fools, from the wise to the ridiculous. Modernizing the language of the play, Alison Carey’s translation revives the joy of this comedy, taking the archaic humor and renewing it for a contemporary audience.
