I conceived of this production over 15 years ago whilst watching a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was truly shocked to find people laughing at a scene with Helen and Demetrius in which he threatens to “do thee mischief in the woods,” a veiled rape threat. I couldn’t understand why the director had chosen to do the entire scene in a comedic way and why we as audience members were laughing. Was it because the show is a “comedy” or did we genuinely find this hilarious?

This led me to re-evaluate dozens of other moments in his works. Because we know how these stories will end, we as theatre makers seem less likely to focus on the “smaller” violent moments in a text, and audience members are less likely to care, especially when the play ends in a wedding or when we know the main characters will die tragically. This idea worries me. Does this mean that we are more likely to accept small moments of violence in our own lives because “it’s not as bad as it could be”? Or do we ignore them, hoping that there will be a happy ending if we can just get through these harsher moment?

 I believe that the times we are living through right now have made this play more pressing and relevant that it has ever been during any of its past incarnations.

 Through Violent Delights, we are asking a lot of our audience. We invite you to strip yourselves of your preconceived notions of Shakespeare’s plays, and to help us deconstruct these stories, exposing both the good and the bad. We invite you to notice the smaller acts of violence in our production, and to ask yourself how much aggression you have tolerated in the real world.