News: "The Lark and the Nightingale" Comes to the 2024 Little Shakespeare Festival Beginning August 9th

Beginning August 9, The Little Shakespeare Festival at FRIGID New York will present The Lark and the Nightingale, written by Mindy Mawhirter and Alyssa Cokinis and directed by Melody Erfani. The Little Shakespeare Festival is FRIGID New York’s annual celebration of independent theatre and performance that takes inspiration from the immortal bard, William Shakespeare. Each year, companies are offered a different theme or idea to help guide their work. This year the festival’s theme is Camaraderie and Community.

The Lark and the Nightingale is a queer retelling of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Othello. Juliet and Desdemona, two characters canonically destined for tragic endings, break away from their scripts and attempt to find happiness in each other. Desdemona battles duty with love while Juliet struggles to let love consume her entirely. When confronted with their scripted ends, they must advocate for one another and prove that their love is worth fighting for.

Mindy Mawhirter (co-playwright and Juliet) is an Oregon- and New York-based playwright and performer with a focus in devised and classical work who strives to tell queer-centric stories that deal with trauma, loss, and womanhood; and Alyssa Cokinis (co-playwright and Desdemona) is a writer/theatre artist from Iowa, currently based in Oregon, and the founder/editor of some scripts, an independent press dedicated to scripted works, most recently publishing the anthology Monologues by LGBTQIA+ Writers for LGBTQIA+ Actors. In The Lark and the Nightingale, earlier produced at the Oregon Fringe Festival in April 2024, the playwrights desired to give voice to female characters in Shakespeare's tragedies who often don't have agency of their own or are otherwise punished for their agency. The play "Frankensteins" dialogue from other Shakespearean works to weave together a new canon of queer, sapphic love between two characters who otherwise would never meet, showing that true happiness can only be found while living as their most authentic selves.

The Lark and the Nightingale is directed by Melody Erfani - founder of Lower East Side Shakespeare Co. and a theatre creator and director who works on both the East and West coasts and specializes in creating with an ensemble, new works, and classical adaptations - and features Mindy Mawhirter as Juliet, Alyssa Cokinis as Desdemona, and Ahmir Andrews as Othello. Sound design is by Ash (musicbyash.com). 
  
Performances will take place at UNDER St Marks Theater, 94 St Marks Place, on the following dates:
August 9 at 7 pm
August 10 at 2 pm
August 11 at 9 pm
August 15 at 7 pm
August 17 at 2 pm

$25 tickets in-person
$20 tickets online streaming

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