Sweet Wag Shakespeare presents the sensational Jacobean comedy The City Nightcap by Robert Davenport, and invites you to take a delightful romp through a world of lascivious courtiers, high end courtesans, virtuous wives, foolish husbands, treacherous lackeys, and double entendre.
Tongues are wagging in Verona with tidbits of suspicion, temptation, seduction, and betrayal in the Italian court. Lorenzo Medico worries that his wife Abstemia is unfaithful, while Count Lodovico trusts that his wife Dorothea is a pillar of virtue. The wives are tested and tempted by the wiles of their husbands, the gossips of the city, and the dashing rakes of the Italian court. Yet in the end the husbands must take responsibility for their marriages. Will the men’s suspicion and naiveté invite a cuckold’s horns or marital bliss? “Crede quod habes, et habes” or “believe that you have it and you have it” is the play’s subtitle, and a reminder that by our words and actions we each create our own reality.
This sophisticated city comedy is rehearsed and performed in the style of the American Shakespeare Center’s Actor’s Renaissance Season. The actors have ten days to rehearse from cue scripts without a director or designers in order to explore Shakespeare’s original staging conditions.
Sweet Wag Shakespeare, Mary Baldwin College’s current Master of Fine Arts company, combines innovative approaches and early modern texts to stage insistent and incisive productions. The City Nightcap features all eleven of the wags. Aubrey Whitlock as stage manager and Jess Hamlet as dramaturg will shepherd the show to the stage, while the remaining nine wags are let loose to create a no holds barred final performance.
The City Nightcap runs Monday, February 1 through Wednesday, February 3 at 8:00 p.m. at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia. Admission is free and donations are encouraged.
For further information about The City Nightcap performances, please contact us at [email protected] or visit our website sweetwagshakespeare.com.
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