Director’s Note

Love’s Labor’s Lost is so many things. It’s a rangy, free-spirited, oddly plotted comedy that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a brilliant capture of the extremely earnest and profoundly naïve spirit that inhabits us all when we are young. It’s a scathing indictment of those unfettered actions that tread the fine, line between what one might call ‘wit’, and another might call ‘meanness’. It’s the literary equivalent of pop-art: Andy Warhol took a soup can, the most ordinary of objects, and placed it on a canvas over and over again in ever increasing maddening, whimsical, provocative ways; Shakespeare takes the common elements of a romantic comedy, tosses them into a fictional-but-not enclave in the woods, and lets all the typical constraints of a well-behaved society go by the wayside in order to make a play where the characters invent their own rules — their own selves — and then transform, break, and re-make those rules over again - also in increasingly whimsical, wonderful, maddening ways.

It is a play that knows it’s a play, and in that, not unique — but it recognizes itself in an attempt to capture a paradox inherent within both theatre and life. In the theatre, we try awfully hard to help you (the audience), get interested in the characters, invested in their journeys, their endings…all of it. We want you to care about something that’s going on in that story, on that stage. We want it to never be boring, or false, and we want it to somehow all have meant something at the end. We hope it will have meant something (in the end), to you and to us — but we can’t ever really know. I think it’s the same with life. We want to create lives for ourselves that have meaning, and love, and wisdom, and experiences. We want to care, and we want to be invested in the world around us.

Love’s Labor’s Lost is so many things. The most important thing happens in the last ten minutes. I hope you’ll forget you’ve read this and can be swept up in all the things it is until it becomes the thing it sets out to do. It tells a truth about who we are in our youth, in our middle-age, in our dotage, in our ending.

Director’s Bio

Amanda Dehnert

Productions include: West Side Story (director), Carnegie Hall at the Knockdown Center, Queens NY; Lucy & Charlie’s Honeymoon (by Matthew Yee, world premiere musical) Eastland: A New Musical (world premiere - director, orchestrator), and Peter Pan – A Play (by Amanda Dehnert, world premiere), all for Lookingglass Theatre Company; Timon of Athens (adaptor, composer, director), Into the Woods (director, music director/conductor), My Fair Lady (director, music director), Julius Caesar (director, adaptor), all for Oregon Shakespeare Festival; Richard III (director, adaptor, composer), for The Public Theatre Mobile Shakespeare Unit; Cloudlands (by Adam Gwon and Octravio Solis; director, world premiere), for South Coast Repertory; The Verona Project (words and music by Amanda Dehnert, world premiere), for California Shakespeare Theatre; Death of a Salesman (director, composer), for Dallas Theatre Center); The Fantasticks (director, music director), for Trinity Rep, Long Wharf, Arena Stage, and South Coast Rep; Cabaret (director), for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Canada; Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (director, adaptor, composer), for Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. Amanda is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University.

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“World-class performances!”— Hi! Drama

“Phoenix Theatre Ensemble is doing something wonderful in Nyack!” —Broadway Radio

Returns for 2023 Fall season!

September 22 to October 21

Special for the Shakespeare Festival Audience: 10% discount on adult tickets for every performance ( At checkout enter code: BARD )

CHOOSE from 30 performances, presented by over 40 New York City actors, directors, dancers musicians, choreographers, set designers and costumers. Six indoor and outdoor stages. All in Nyack—a treasure trove of over 100 shops and restaurants packed into a walkable one square mile.

Theatre

• Crime and Punishment: Edge-of-your seat adaption of Dostoyevsky’s classic

• The Importance of Being Earnest: Oscar Wilde’s frothy, funny, forever comedy

• Drinks with Dead Poets: Glyn Maxwell’s pints and conversations with deceased literati

• The Wind in the Willows: Kenneth Grahame’s beloved book in a new onstage animation

• Children’s Shakespeare Theatre: Young actors bravely present the best of the Bard

Music and Dance

• Pan: A theatrical dance fable on Black masculinity by Emotions Physical Theatre

• ARTSRock in concert: World class instrumentalists o er a specially curated live program

Special Events

• Now I am Alone: Acclaimed classical actor Geo rey Owens performs Shakespeare

• Reflections From the Shallow End of the Dating Pool: Real experiences good and bad

• Scandalton: Court-side seats to social drama. Audience helps spill the tea

• Honduras: A riveting performance by Valeria Avina of real accounts from the US Southern

Border 2018

• Nyack is the stage: Free smart phone-based augmented reality walking tour of the village

Tickets: LiveArtsInNyack.com or Box O ce at 833-681-4800 artistic director Davis McCallum managing director Kendra Ekelund