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."