The last full production of three witches shakespeare’s 2023–2024 season is a play that was not actually written by the Bard of Avon, William Shakespeare, but rather, “Gallathea,” an Elizabethan era comedy, written by John Lyly.
While “Gallathea” was first performed at Greenwich Palace on New Year’s Day 1588 for Queen Elizabeth I herself by a troupe of young boy actors, three witches shakespeare will cast a spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities to their performance in Louisville. The play is set in a village on the Lincolnshire shore, but three witches will be performing among the trees at the Louisville Nature Center.
The theme of the script, which was originally published in 1588, is explicitly queer yet — unsurprisingly — long overlooked. In the play, villagers are told that the fairest young woman among them will be sacrificed, so two fathers disguise their children as boys in the hope that they will be spared. The young people wear gender nonconforming clothes, mimic each other’s behavior, and eventually fall in love. At one point, divine intervention causes a gender transformation.
This site specific production features deities, fairies, shepherds — and characters with modern accoutrements. Queering theater as they are wont to do, three witches shakespeare have developed a play-within-a-play, and set their metadrama at a summer sleepaway theatre camp called Camp Upon Avon in the neon-drenched pre-internet year of 1987.
The three witches shakespeare production of “As You Like It” at Play Louisville “absolutely crushed,” says playwright Allie Fireel, “selling out every night of the original run and selling pretty damn good on the added Wednesday night performance.” The company is looking forward to closing their season with similar success.
Gallathea: A Forest Fantasy
Louisville Nature Center
Beargrass Creek State Nature Preserve
3745 Illinois Ave.
Thursday, May 9–Sunday, May 12
6:30 p.m.
Tickets are available on a sliding scale from $10 to $20.
This article appears in Apr 24 – May 7, 2024.