Antony Cleopatra and
FEBRUARY 7–8, 2025
DAVID GEFFEN SCHOOL OF DRAMA AT YALE
James Bundy, Elizabeth Parker Ware Dean Florie Seery, Associate Dean
Chantal Rodriguez, Associate Dean Carla L. Jackson, Assistant Dean Nancy Yao, Assistant Dean
Antony and Cleopatra
By William Shakespeare
Adapted by Destyne R. Miller and Elliot Valentine
Directed by Destyne R. Miller
Creative Team
Scenic Designer
Jennifer Yuqing Cao
Costume Designer
Allison Morgan
Lighting Designer
Finn Bamber
Sound Designer
Constant Dzah
Projection Designer
Dwight Bellisimo
Production Dramaturg
Elliot Valentine
Technical Director
Matteo Lanzarotta
Fight Director
Michael Rossmy
Stage Manager
Claire Young Cast
Lepidus/Dolabella/Soothsayer
Hiếu Ngọc Bùi
Charmian
Mariah Copeland
Cleopatra
Messiah Cristine
Octavius/Mardian
Michael Saguto
Setting
There and Then, Here and Now
Enobarbus/Clown
Kamal Sehrawy
Antony (Vin) Tré Scott
Iris/Octavia
Rosie Victoria
Antony and Cleopatra is performed without an intermission.
Content Guidance
This production cotains partial nudity, staged violence and self-harm, and the use of haze and flashing lights.
This production is supported by The Benjamin Mordecai III Production Fund.
Artistic
Assistant Sound Designer and Engineer
Jinling Duan 段珒苓
Assistant Stage Managers
Josie Cooper and Whitney Renell Roy
Production Production Manager
Mara Bredovskis
Assistant Technical Director
Nat King Taylor
Production Electrician
Md Fadzil “Fed” Hanafi Md Saad
Projection Engineer
Leo Surach
Lighting Programmer
Gib Gibney
Projection Programmer
Christian Killada
Associate Safety Advisor
John Simone
Run Crew
John Hardy, Alesandra Reto Lopez, Forrest Rumbaugh, April Salazar
Administration
Associate Managing Director
Jeremy Landes
Assistant Managing Director
Sarah Saifi
Management Assistant
Catherine MacKay
House Manager
Adrian Alexander Hernandez
Production Photographer
Maza Rey
David Geffen School of Drama productions are supported by the work of more than 200 faculty and staff members throughout the year.
Special Thanks
Martin Lighting, Jasmine Brooks, Andreas Andreou, Micah Ohno, Amanda Blitz, Ellora Venkat, Aura Michelle
Yale acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.
We also acknowledge the legacy of slavery in our region and the enslaved African people whose labor was exploited for generations to help establish the business of Yale University as well as the economy of Connecticut and the United States.
The Shakespeare Repertory Projects are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at David Geffen School of Drama at Yale to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works. Your attendance meaningfully completes this process.
THE BENJAMIN MORDECAI III PRODUCTION FUND , established by a graduate of the School, honors the memory of the Tony Award-winning producer who served as Managing Director of Yale Repertory Theatre, 1982–1993, and as Associate Dean and Chair of the Theater Management Program from 1993 until his death in 2005.
A Transformative Love
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is inspired by the life of Mark Antony as told by Plutarch, a Greco-Roman historian who chronicled famous biographies in his collection Parallel Lives. In his account of their times, Plutarch paints Antony’s lover Cleopatra as a manipulative seductress. Plutarch’s Antony was “swayed neither by the sentiments of a commander nor of a brave man, but…dragged along by the woman as if he had become incorporate with her and must go where she did.” To Plutarch, love is what led to Antony’s failures.
As a 17th-century English play based on a Roman account of the 1st-century BCE War of Actium, Antony and Cleopatra is also biased against Egypt. A meeting of ‘East’ and ‘West’ from a Western point of view written before the age of imperialism, Shakespeare’s stereotypes of Egypt build the foundations for Orientalism, creating a foreign Other that is too hedonistic, too luxurious, too undisciplined in opposition to the honorable Rome. As writer Emer O’Toole explains, “universal Shakespeare was both a beacon of the greatness of European civilization and a gateway into that greatness.” Long after his death, Shakespeare’s legacy became a tool of Western empire.
To frame this play now, centuries later, we must disrupt the narrative at Antony and Cleopatra’s center: Plutarch’s biography of Antony. Instead of a tragedy of a great man seduced into weakness, our Antony and Cleopatra is a love story. Instead of Egypt as the Other, we use our Egypt to explore emotional freedom, centered against Rome’s cold, strict conformity.
As director Destyne Miller proposes, “In America… Black women are not supposed to own their sexiness or sensuality—especially not for their own pleasure…. Antony and Cleopatra shows us a woman who embodies the exact opposite of these toxic societal pressures. Cleopatra is the Black woman that all Black women are striving to be: fully human, with full emotions and full control over everything we are, can be and want to be, without fear.” In our production, Cleopatra’s fullness extends to her empire. As women’s studies scholar Katherine McKittrick explains in her book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle , Black feminist geographies pursue a “poetics of landscape… not derived from the desire for socioeconomic possession…but rather by a grammar of liberation, through which ethical human-geographies can be recognized and expressed.”
While Rome is preoccupied with “material ownership”—the expansion of empire—our Egypt champions this “grammar of liberation.” Cleopatra opens up possibilities of liberation, recognition of the self, and self-expression for herself, her court, the audience, and most of all, Antony. Before Cleopatra, Antony is a man circumscribed by his strict Roman upbringing. Once he falls in love, he is torn between the way he was raised and the person he has become. Our adaptation centers how the love between these rulers transforms them both. While their love can save them if they let it, the fear of losing themselves to it can lead to their doom.
—Elliot Valentine, Production Dramaturg