Richard Romagnoli will direct Jan Maxwell and F. Murray Abraham in a reading of Howard Barker’s 2002 play Gertrude – The Cry on Monday, 29 November, at 7.30pm. The presentation, produced in collaboration with The Barker Project, is a part of Red Bull Theater‘s Revelations Readings series and will take place at the Theater at St. Clement’s, 423 West 46th Street, in New York. More information on the reading, and tickets, are available here.

Howard Barker wrote these notes for the 2002 production of the play by his Wrestling School company (sentiments that I have in mind as I direct What She Knew for a 1 December opening):

Shakespeare’s moral sense and his role in a Christian/Reformation society compelled him to routinely punish transgression with guilty feeling, and Gertrude’s sketchily described character is soddened with shame and regret. The unevenness of her portrayal, to which T.S. Eliot famously drew attention, compelled me, also a tragic writer but not burdened with the same religious sentiments, to attempt a new Gertrude. This one was to be passionate, defiant and more authentically tragic than the adolescent prince himself. Gertrude is bound to Claudius by an exquisite crime or the play hardly hangs together.

In shifting the focus to her fatal eroticism (a hypnotic regard which engulfs Claudius and wounds him grievously), I have set out to reinvigorate an ancient theme, annexed by Shakespeare from earlier texts, and turn it as he did to yet further extremes. As painters have always revisited the subjects of the masters, so dramatists must go back to plough the terrain of earlier works for fresh meanings pertinent to their time, an activity surely not reserved for stage directors alone.

In the hands of Maxwell, Abraham and Romagnoli, the evening is likely to be unforgettable. Get your tickets now.