(NEW YORK, NY) -- The award-winning Red Bull Theater will conclude their spring Revelation Readings Series on Monday, May 18, 2026 at 7:30pm with Cymbeline, Refinished by William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw and directed by Michael Sexton.
The May reading will include Ra'Mya Latiah Aikens, Amir Arison, Tina Benko, Carson Elrod, Michael Karadsheh, Alfredo Narciso, Geoffrey Owens, Tom Pecinka, Vaughn Pole, Jay O. Sanders, and more. It will premiere LIVE and Live Streamed from the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Peter Norton Symphony Space (2537 Broadway).
A recording of Cymbeline, Refinished will be available from Tuesday, May 19 at 7:30pm ET thru Sunday, May 24 at 11:59pm ET. Open captions will be available from Wednesday, May 20 at 7:30pm ET thru Sunday, May 24 at 11:59pm ET. Tickets for the in-person reading are $52 and $77, including all fees. Tickets for online access are $30. Tickets are available for purchase online. This reading is made possible by the special support of the Michael Tuch Foundation.
“I’ve been waiting all year for this reading!” said Artistic Director Jesse Berger. “It’s not every day you get to hear a play by Shakespeare and Shaw at the same time. Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare’s most magnificently under-rated plays. If you don’t know it, the incredible story of Imogen and her journey will have you transfixed with its combination of romance and danger. Add Shaw’s 20th century feminism to Shakespeare’s 17th century humanism, and you have a mixture of combustible theatricality—performed by some of the greatest actors in NYC. Join us—online or in-person—and you will be glad you did!”
One great playwright rewrites another, as George Bernard Shaw imagines a refreshingly feminist ending for Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. In the same vein as Shaw’s final work Shakes versus Shav—a 10-minute Punch and Judy show in which the two bards debate who’s the better writer—Shaw tries to improve upon “one of Shakespeare’s finest later works” that nonetheless “goes to pieces” in Act V. The reading will feature Shakespeare’s original play, with Shaw’s reimagined final act, giving us a seamless experience of the two singular geniuses.
“For 20 years, Red Bull Theater has, thankfully, continued to keep many great classic plays alive for contemporary audiences.”—New York Times
Shakespeare was the most prolific playwright in the English language until George Bernard Shaw’s 52 plays set a new record. For Red Bull’s audiences, Shakespeare needs no introduction. Or at least, his plays do not; as for the author, astonishingly little is known about his life, and the line of speculation referred to as “the authorship controversy” continues to produce new theories about who wrote the plays. We will not wade into them here. About Shaw, by contrast, we know a great deal, much of it from his enormous body of work. His career began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and continued until the middle of the twentieth. Like Shakespeare’s, his name has become an adjective: Shavian.
Born in Dublin but living in London as an adult, Shaw supported himself by lecturing and writing reviews of art, music and theater. After he began writing plays, he arranged to publish many of them with prefaces or forewords, at times taking on his critics or including autobiographical details. In addition, the published plays had such lengthy and abundant stage directions that reading a play by Shaw is a rather different experience from seeing it performed. Shaw was a declared Socialist and an ardent reformer and his convictions permeate both his plays and the prefaces and forewords, particularly with the early plays such as Widowers’ Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession.” He acknowledged the influence of his Norwegian contemporary, Henrik Ibsen, whose “New Drama” asks us to question “which is the villain and which the hero” (Shaw’s “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” 1890). Shaw was scornful of many theatrical practices, among them the impulse to “improve” Shakespeare’s plays by supplying them with happy endings. This theatrical practice had begun in the seventeenth century and produced, as he wrote in his foreword to Cymbeline Refinished, some “crude literary butcheries [that were] successfully imposed upon the public” as recently as the late nineteenth century. Hence it was a surprise, but a very interesting one, when Shaw produced a new ending for Cymbeline. -- MARTHA TUCK ROZETT | Professor Emerita, Department of English, University at Albany, SUNY.
Red Bull Theater brings rarely seen classic plays to dynamic new life for contemporary audiences, uniting a respect for tradition with a modern sensibility. Named for the rowdy Jacobean playhouse that illegally performed plays in England during the years of Puritan rule, Red Bull Theater is New York City’s home for dynamic performances of great plays that stand the test of time. With the Jacobean plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as its cornerstone, the company also produces new works that are in conversation with the classics. A home for artists, scholars, and students, Red Bull Theater delights and engages the intellect and imagination of audiences, and strives to make its work accessible, diverse, and welcoming to all.
