{"id":1946,"date":"2016-12-06T16:06:29","date_gmt":"2016-12-06T16:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unrehearsedchicago.com\/?p=1946"},"modified":"2018-07-24T15:27:08","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T20:27:08","slug":"the-seven-ages-of-unrehearsed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.unrehearsedchicago.com\/?p=1946","title":{"rendered":"The Seven Ages of Unrehearsed Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"

[By Jared McDaris]<\/p>\n

We haven’t done December shows in a while, but King Lear<\/a>‘s late production coincides nicely with Unrehearsed’s first show ever back in 2009.<\/p>\n

December 5th\u00a0was the seventh anniversary of our first production of MacBeth<\/em>. Mildly frustrated with grad school, I made a somewhat impulsive decision to help facilitate the verse education of my classmates and myself by throwing together an unrehearsed production. My classmate Danny Pancratz had actually put more work into Unrehearsed than I at the time, and I knew the ol’ Scottish King was a dream role of his, so I (again, impulsively) chose the ol’ Scottish Tragedy and went to work.<\/p>\n

It was a very lucky choice for my first play. Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, it’s relatively simple as far as historical plays go, featuring many roles of fairly surmountable size and complexity. There was only one particularly daunting role, and I knew ahead of time that the performer of said role was very motivated to do it justice. The fairly overt morality was rendered even more black-and-white by an engaged audience, who delighted in booing MacBeth and his wife like music hall villains the instant they began discussing Duncan’s murder, and did not let off until the bloody King’s beheading. This and the increasingly broad violence, and of course the infamous chanting of the witches, conspired to create a virtually fool-proof show.<\/p>\n