Eighteen years after it first staged the play, Red Bull Theater is going back to The Cenci, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s verse tragedy, for a single Revelation Reading on Thursday, November 5, at 7 p.m. at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre, with Blaize Adler-Ivanbrook and Amir Arison in the company.
Eleanor Holdridge adapts and directs, as she did in 2008, when the late Roger Rees played Count Cenci in the company’s first production of the play. This return also opens the Romantic Revivals Project, the latest stage of a partnership between Red Bull and scholars that has been putting Romantic-era drama in front of audiences since 2012.
Joining Adler-Ivanbrook and Arison are Carol Halstead, Anthony Michael Lopez, Jason Sanchez, David Ryan Smith, Derek Smith and Raphael Nash Thompson, with more names to follow. Roles have not been announced.
Shelley came across the story of Beatrice Cenci (1577–1599) in Rome in 1819 and turned the city’s long-told legend into a tragedy about what is left when every institution meant to protect someone looks away. Count Cenci rules his Roman household by cruelty; when Beatrice is refused help by the guests at his table, and finds that her lover Orsino has given her up for the priesthood, she decides to act for herself. Red Bull flags depictions of domestic and sexual violence, incest, coercive control and murder.
The reading is produced with the Byron Society of America, the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Keats-Shelley House in Rome. It will also be simulcast, and the recording streams on demand from 7 p.m. ET on Friday, November 6, until 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, November 15, with open captions from Saturday, November 7.
Peter Norton Symphony Space is at 2537 Broadway. In-person and streaming tickets are sold through Red Bull Theater.
