When creating the Seeds of Time festival, curator AeJay Antonis Marquis was looking to “create programming that invites multiple ways in” while also “inviting conversations about the classics in our modern lives.”
So the first thing they did to invite audiences in was make all tickets “Pay What You Will.” The resulting festival runs three weekends from July 19 to Aug. 3 at the Marin Shakespeare Company’s downtown San Rafael theater.
While the tickets could cost nothing, there’s an opportunity to make a donation so this type of theater can continue. What type of theater? Marquis and MSC artistic director Jon Tracy invited various playwrights to reimagine the classical canon.
Cathleen Riddley’s Where’s Mama? came from Riddley looking at the Shakespearean canon and thinking, “So much happens because of the patriarchy. It would be different if these women had mothers or aunties.“
Then there’s Torange Yeghiazarian’s English-language adaptation (with original music by Sirvan Manhoobi) of Leili and Majnun. Yeghiazarian was keen to “introduce theatrical content from the Middle East to the West in English so that more audiences can experience the form.” However, she found that the story she had known all her life was not the whole story. She was surprised to find that in the original Persian text, Leili is an active participant, rather than just an object of desire. Yeghiazarian realized, “We bring back these ancient texts because we think we know them, but we don’t. There is value in rediscovering, a deeper exploration.”
Along with Riddley and Yeghiazarian, the festival also features: Dr. Austin Dean Ashford’s Rap Monologues, a dynamic mash-up of Shakespearean verse and hip-hop; Robert Parsons’ Tri Sestry, a surreal, cross-cultural twist on Chekhov’s Three Sisters; Leigh M. Marshall’s The Rosaline Play, a bold retelling of Romeo & Juliet through Rosaline’s eyes; and Julius Ernesto Rea’s Othello.exe, a speculative, tech‑infused interrogation of race, AI and authenticity in Shakespeare’s Othello.
Some might question why a classic would need to be reexamined or adapted. Riddley has an answer for that: “The work isn’t dead; it is designed to be interacted with. It’s meant to be taken down off the shelf, to be played with, to ask, ‘How can I honor this?’ It’s that play and honor that makes it alive in our times.”
I’m pretty sure Shakespeare would have approved.
The ‘Seeds of Time’ festival runs weekends July 19-Aug. 3 at Marin Shakespeare Company’s Center for Performing Arts, Education, and Social Justice, 514 4th St., San Rafael. Sat, 1 and 7:30pm; Sun 1 and 6:30pm. Pay What You Will. 415.388.5208. marinshakespeare.org.
