We're changing things up a little bit here at Bad Quarto Productions. Until 2016, we existed as a project-based company: we produced plays when we had a sufficient interest among our membership, and felt like we had gained enough expertise in the textual and performance history of rarely performed plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and modern plays we felt could be illuminated by those staging conditions, to be able to provide new performance histories for these works, along with para-textual commentary from scholars and artists. Our goal in this approach was to make these plays more accessible to readers, scholars, and theatre artists, and begin a broader conversation about what it means for a play to be "Shakespearean."
In 2016, there was sufficient interest from our company members that we experimented with our first planned season of plays, and we continued this experiment in 2017, but the truth is, we're not happy with the results. We're a small company with limited resources, and committing so much of our time and attention to producing plays means we barely have any of either to create the para-textual commentary. While we are pleased with the work of all involved with our production of Cupid's Revenge, for example, we were unable to explore it as richly from a scholarly perspective, or document the artistic process as richly as we have become accustomed to doing in the past.
It doesn't matter to us if our productions are the first in centuries if they are also the last for centuries, and for 2018 we have decided to return to our original format. We are now examining titles we might like to explore, and speaking with artists we might like to work with later in the year. And along the way, we hope to flesh out some of the work we've done in the past year to help shed light on some of these dingy corners of Shakespearean text that we love so well.
Thank you for joining us, and we hope to see you again soon!
