Shakespeare livens up LTCC summer nights

Lake Tahoe Community College is offering students an opportunity to transport themselves to Tudor England by driving 45 minutes north.

The college is offering two sections of English 131A, “Shakespeare in Performance, Tahoe Style.” Each section consists of two lectures in advance of a trip to the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival to see a play in July. The festival is presenting Shakespeare’s history “Richard III” and comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” this summer on its Sand Harbor stage.

“Richard III” depicts England’s last Plantaganet king, who reigned from 1843-45, as a hunchbacked misanthrope. From opening with the line “Now is the winter of our discontent” to famously offering up his kingdom for a horse in the heat of battle, the murderous title character is one of Shakespeare’s great villains — and the organ of some of his most famous dialogue. Movie adaptations have included Laurence Olivier’s iconic 1955 depiction, Ian McKellen’s 1995 retelling, which placed the action in a fascist nation during the 1930s in an alternate reality, and Al Pacino’s 1996 documentary “Looking for Richard.”

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a romantic comedy that follows four lovers into the forest, where they encounter the fairies of the forest as well as a troupe of workingmen putting on a play within the play. The comedy of mistaken identity and altered perceptions is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays for the stage, and rose to prominence again with the counterculture in the 1960s. The cast of a 1999 film adaptation included Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Calista Flockhart and Christian Bale.

(The Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival playbill also includes two performances of “A Midsummer NightMARE,” which director Christopher Childers describes on the festival’s Web site as “sort of an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ falling through the rabbit hole type experience — a little bit of a hallucination, dream and nightmare all kind of mixed in to one.”)

One section of the class consists of a lecture on the evenings of July 7 and 23, with a trip to see “Richard III” on Friday, July 25. The other section has lectures July 7 and 16, and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on July 18.

Students will be responsible for their own transportation, but the $18 ticket charge represents a reduced student rate. Each section is equal for 0.25 units at the college.
Michelle Risdon teaches both sections of the course. Each section ends with a final meeting to discuss the play.

The last date to register for either section of the class is July 7. For more information, visit www.ltcc.edu.

If You Go The Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival runs July 9 through Aug. 17 in Sand Harbor. “William Shakespeare may have died 400 years ago, but audiences still connect with the plays thanks to his acute ability to pinpoint the major themes in humanity,” artistic director Jan Powell said on the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival’s Web site. “The beauty of producing and directing, and in turn watching, a Shakespeare production is that it can really be set in any time period — the stories adapt remarkably well. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ doesn’t lose impact or meaning when placed into modern context as we have for the 2008 season. And the tale of ‘Richard III,’ which we’ve set during his actual rise to power and reign in the 1480s, holds universal truths about leadership, greed and political manipulation that could easily translate into any era.”