Shakespeare

Theatre Company

Washington, DC

The Shakespeare Theatre Company is a regional theatre company located in Washington, D.C. The theatre company focuses primarily on plays from the Shakespeare canon, but its seasons include works by other classic playwrights such as Euripides, Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, Schiller, Coward and Tennessee Williams. The company manages and performs in the Harman Center for the Arts, consisting of the Lansburgh Theatre and Sidney Harman Hall. In cooperation with George Washington University, they run the Academy for Classical Acting.

The company is a member of the League of Resident Theatres, a national theatre association. The theatre’s current artistic director (since 2019) is Simon Godwin, who previously was based in London, serving as associate director of London's Royal National Theatre, associate director of the Royal Court Theatre and associate director at Bristol Old Vic.

The Shakespeare Theatre Company has two current performance venues. The newer and larger Sidney Harman Hall occupies the lower half of an 11-story office tower. The exterior is distinguished by a glass façade curtain wall on a projected bay window. The 774-seat performance space can be configured as a proscenium, thrust, semi-arena, corridor or bare stage. The smaller Lansburgh Theatre is in the restored former Lansburgh's Department Store flagship store, originally built in 1882. The performance space is 451-seat classic proscenium stage. The seating arrangement is reminiscent of a Greek Amphitheater. It has been described as "an intimate space for dramatic theatre, ensemble music and dance".

In addition to its performance spaces, the company has performed shows at the Terrace Theater in the Kennedy Center and maintains administrative offices, rehearsal studios, and a costume shop in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. A set construction and painting shop is located near Catholic University in Northeast D.C. Additionally, the company maintains a stage properties shop for the construction and storage of furniture, decorative items, hand props and a variety of set dressing items located just outside D.C. on the northeast side of the city.

The Shakespeare Theatre Company's self professed mission is "...to present classic theatre of scope and size in an imaginative, skillful and accessible American style that honors the playwrights' language and intentions while viewing their work through a 21st-century lens". Their vision is to "... endeavor to be an important resource to an expanded national and international community—as the nation’s premier destination for classic theatre, as a training ground for the next generation of theatre artists and as a model provider of high-quality educational content for students and scholars."

Learn More About The Company

The Folger Shakespeare Library on Capitol Hill includes a replica of an Elizabethan theatre, originally used for lectures and tours. In 1970 this space was transformed into a functioning playhouse, and soon Folger Theatre Group (later The Folger Theatre) was organized to perform in the space.

After years of discussion, Amherst College, administering body of the Folger Shakespeare Library, in 1986 withdrew financial support for the company. To save the company, concerned citizens led by R. Robert Linowes reincorporated it as the non-profit Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger, later hiring Michael Kahn as artistic director. The company continued to perform at the Folger for the next six years.

Changing its name to The Shakespeare Theatre, the troupe moved in 1992 to the Lansburgh Theatre, a newly built space in the original Lansburgh's Department Store building in the Penn Quarter. At the start of the 2005–06 season, it adopted the current name, Shakespeare Theatre Company. The company constructed another theatre, Sidney Harman Hall, which opened in 2007 in the lower part of an office building in the quarter, and the two theatres were joined to become the Harman Center for the Arts.