Folger Theatre Announces Fourth Annual Reading Room Festival
Folger Theatre at the Folger Shakespeare Library announced the plays and playwrights for the fourth annual Reading Room Festival, a four-day festival of staged readings, panel discussions, workshops, and community celebrations, where Shakespeare serves as the starting point for today’s playwrights. This year’s lineup leans heavily into the musicality of Shakespeare and includes new works from Alexa Babakhanian, Alberto Bonilla, Barbara Fuchs, and Marcus Gardley, with Arena Stage’s Artistic Director Hana S. Sharif directing one staged reading. The Reading Room Festival runs from Thursday, January 22, through Sunday, January 25, 2026.
"From myth to music, this year’s festival explores the vibrant musicality of Shakespeare's verse, adapts bilingual texts for young audiences, addresses the age-old authorship question: Did he write it or didn’t he? (He did!), and asks that vital question: When is a new play finished?” shared Karen Ann Daniels, Director of Programming and Artistic Director, Folger Theatre. “We’re going to have a lot of fun in January. We are looking at four new plays selected especially for Washington, DC audiences. It’s our fourth year and I feel like we’re just getting started.”
At the Reading Room Festival, theater artists, critics, and scholars re-envision the stories of Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights, with audience members invited into this celebration of creative community. The festival exists to help playwrights further develop their work over a week-long process with a creative team, actors, and musicians. This process culminates in a staged reading of the plays for an audience. Panels and post-show discussions engage audiences and artists in conversations that bring the works to a deeper level of understanding.
This year’s Reading Room Festival features staged readings of four new works: Cymbeline: A Telenovela Melodramatic Western, a bilingual musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s late romance conceived by Alberto Bonilla, with original music by Anthony De Angelis and direction by Nadia Guevara, based on Alec H. Wild’s treatment of the Shakespeare text; Dark Lady: A Musical Theater Work, written by Alexa Babakhanian and directed by Rebecca Martínez, which explores the question of whether Elizabethan poet Amelia Bassano authored Shakespeare’s plays; the world premiere of Fuente Ovejuna, a new adaptation for younger audiences by Barbara Fuchs of Lope de Vega’s Spanish Golden Age classic directed by Kelsey Mesa; and LEAR, Marcus Gardley’s modern-verse translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, which was originally commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “Play On!” program, directed by Arena Stage Artistic Director Hana S. Sharif. Each reading will be followed by a conversation with the artists that offers audiences insights into the creative process behind these new plays.
For the past three years, the Reading Room Festival has introduced audiences to new plays that have gone on to full-scale Folger Theatre productions, including the world premiere of Lauren M. Gunderson’s A Room in the Castle, a critically acclaimed retelling of Hamlet co-produced with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company; Al Letson’s Julius X: A Re-envisioning of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, which remixes Civil Rights history through the lens of Shakespeare’s tragedy; and Broadway star Jacob Ming-Trent’s autobiographical How Shakespeare Saved My Life, which will be on stage in June at the Folger in a rolling world premiere. In addition to Folger Theatre productions, Sarah Mantell’s Everything That Never Happened, a revision of The Merchant of Venice, was produced by Baltimore Center Stage last season.
Reading Room Festival All-Access Passes are now available. The pass provides admission to all four staged readings and a vibrant lineup of immersive and musical events, including open rehearsals, workshops led by artists and scholars, post-show conversations facilitated by critics and scholars, panel discussions with artistic leaders and scholars, and community celebrations.
Tickets for individual events will go on sale in early January.
Reading Room Festival All-Access Passes are available at folger.edu/readingroom or by contacting the Folger box office at (202) 544-7077. Early bird passes are $100 through December 31; passes purchased beginning January 1 are $125.
THE PLAYS
Cymbeline: A Telenovela Melodramatic Western
Original Concept and Idea by Alberto Bonilla
Music composed by Anthony De Angelis
Adaptation of Shakespeare’s text of Cymbeline by Alec H. Wild
Spanish adaptation of text by Alberto Bonilla
Original Spanish translation of Cymbeline by D. Eudaldo Viver (1884)
Directed by Nadia Guevara
Alberto Bonilla shifts the setting of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline from a mythic Roman-occupied ancient Britain to the American Southwest, circa 1893, at the height of the American cowboy myth, a powder-keg of conflict between class and race: farmers against ranchers, frontier pioneers from the East vs. the Mexican and Indigenous populations. The wounds of the American Civil War are still fresh, and the country is trying to unite with the expansion of the railroad connecting East and West. Focusing on the core family conflicts in Shakespeare’s late romance, this bilingual adaptation features high-stakes drama, gritty fights, and intimate moments—all the twists and turns associated with both Latin American melodramas and Shakespearean tragicomedies.
Dark Lady: A Musical Theater Work
Book, Lyrics, and Music by Alexa Babakhanian
Directed by Rebecca Martínez
What would happen if it were discovered that Amelia Bassano, a Venetian Jew and the first woman poet published in England, was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays? And what if this literary secret was revealed by Elizabethan characters existing in a modern-day alternate reality? Discover the Dark Lady, Shakespeare’s muse in his Sonnets, who has been hiding in plain sight for over 400 years. Alexa Babakhanian’s humorous, whimsical musical creates a dynamic score of beatboxing, hip hop, classical, and pop music to highlight the interplay between these two great dramatists and poets.
Fuente Ovejuna
By Lope de Vega
Adapted by Barbara Fuchs
Directed by Kelsey Mesa
World Premiere
In the little town of Fuente Ovejuna life rolls merrily along, with sheep to tend and weddings to plan. But when the Comendador, the town’s governor, decides that everything belongs to him, life is turned upside down. What to do? How to resist? This family-friendly adaptation of Lope de Vega’s Spanish Golden Age classic Fuente Ovejuna invites young audiences to imagine what solidarity looks like, with interactive elements such as audience participation, songs, and crafts to engage children while emphasizing themes of justice, unity, and resistance to tyranny.
LEAR
Translation/adaptation/remix by Marcus Gardley
Directed by Hana S. Sharif
Original text by William Shakespeare
Commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “Play On!”
Set in San Francisco’s Fillmore District during the 1960s, LEAR reimagines Shakespeare’s tragedy of loyalty, love, and madness as a modern parable about the erasure of a Black neighborhood. Once a thriving center of Black art, music, and culture, the Fillmore becomes the site for a King Lear adaptation about an aging real estate mogul, his three daughters, and the threat of urban renewal. This modern-verse translation by Obie Award–winning playwright Marcus Gardley offers a poetic reckoning with history, progress, and patriarchy.