Naked Shakes
Mission & Vision
In 2019, Naked Shakes celebrates its 14th season at UC Santa Barbara, and its mission since 2006 has been to present energetic, exciting, raw, vibrant Shakespeare using the power of the actors and the language. The barren physical theater space is very important to the Naked Shakes concept; it takes on the identity of whatever locale or particular piece of poetic language is described, and yet always reminds the audience they are in a theater. When Prospero in The Tempest describes “the great Globe itself,” he is not only referring to the entire Earth, but also the “Globe” Theater—Shakespeare’s theater. That duality is what Naked Shakes is all about.
The Death of Kings
The Death of Kings is an epic two-play saga directed and adapted by Irwin Appel from eight Shakespearean history plays. Part One: I Come But For Mine Own condenses Richard II, Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V, while Part Two: The White Rose and the Red encompasses Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III. Both parts of The Death of Kings were produced and performed in repertory by Naked Shakes and the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2016. Both plays are self-contained and can be seen in either order. Each play runs under three hours. There is also a third play, The Death of Kings: Seize the Crown that is a ninety-minute version with excerpts from both parts of the full Death of Kings plays. The Death of Kings: Seize the Crown received its European premiere at the Prague Shakespeare Company’s Summer Shakespeare Intensive in 2017, and will be produced by the Southwest Shakespeare Company at Taliesin West in Arizona in March 2019. All three plays are currently available for production and can be presented in a wide variety of venues with flexible cast sizes. For more information, please visit www.deathofkings.com. “Irwin Appel has created something tremendous with Death of Kings. An adaptation of eight of Shakespeare's history plays, Death of Kings condenses the bloody saga … into five hours of pulsating, theatrical turmoil. Both adapter and Director, Appel has succeeded in bringing the pace and intrigue of more modern styles of episodic storytelling…. Death of Kings is a beguiling, boiled-down reworking of the history plays that eliminates cumbersome details. It also serves as an appropriate introduction to the history plays to those less familiar with the works…. Appel's work, clearly a labor of passion, is a brilliant version of Shakespeare's history of England….”
Maggie Yates - BroadwayWorld, March 2016
“What Naked Shakes tries to do is recapture the essence of hearing a Shakespeare play for the first time. We don’t try to recreate Shakespeare as if it is in a museum. When you hear ‘To be or not to be, that is the question,’ you should be experiencing it completely fresh, the way it was for Shakespeare’s audience the first time they heard it. Take a bare stage, a good actor, a good piece of text, great music and sound, a willing audience, and you can make magic happen.”