about may violets spring
MAY VIOLETS SPRING is a new play adapted primarily from Shakespeare's
Hamlet but featuring many of the Bard of Avon's other plays and sonnets, along with the introduction of original verse by James Parenti. Produced by Dare Lab and directed by Reesa Graham, this production focuses on Ophelia's journey as a protagonist through the canon events of
Hamlet. It's a love letter to classical heroines slighted by the narratives of our past and too often also in productions of the present.
The play will run this upcoming April 16th through April 27th, 2014 at The Bridge Theatre in Shetler Studios and we need your help!
our budget
For full transparency, you'll find laid out below everything that's going into our budget for this production. You may notice that our goal is much lower than the total cost. This is because the main purpose of this Indiegogo is to pay our actors and crew. We'd absolutely love to receive more funding towards our other production costs; it's every production's dream to break even! But the most important thing to Dare Lab is that those putting their hearts and souls and precious time into bringing May Violets Spring to life be compensated to the best of our abilities.
$2500.00 (actors and crew)
$2000.00 (theatre space)
$1500.00 (rehearsal space)
$200.00 (promotion)
$200.00 (costumes)
$100.00 (set)
___________________________
$6500.00 (total)
![]()
the perks
First and foremost, anyone that contributes towards May Violets Spring will be featured and thanked in our program. There are levels!
-
$1-$99:
You will be listed as Daisy level
donor in our program.
-
$100-$299: You will be listed as a Rosemary level donor in our program.
-
$300 and up: You will be listed as a Violet level donor in our program.
We've also dreamed up a ton of creative perks to thank you for helping us bring this production to the stage, which you can find to the right!
a note from the playwright
The whole idea in the first place was to do Hamlet, plain and simple. But in doing the work of preparing the role, I became excited and frustrated by Ophelia's place in the story and in the world of Denmark. What was her relationship with Hamlet like? How much did she know about the Ghost and its accusations? What did she see that drove her mad?
And so she shared the soliloquies. Lines were cut and re-assigned so that they became conversations: Ophelia talking Hamlet into bating the King with a play, the two of them debating the nature of mortality, and so on. And once she had this new life, her story became more interesting to me than his. It quickly became very clear that Ophelia was the heroine of a new story running parallel to Hamlet's.
The completed text of the play is a collage of Hamlet, my own verse, and a number of other plays in the canon: The Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, Richard II, Othello, King Lear, The Tempest, Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, All's Well That Ends Well, and Cymbeline, to name a few. Lovers of Shakespeare will find the words of their favorite plays echoed here, finding new and rich resonance from being placed in a new context. It's my hope, though, that the piece flows seamlessly and stands alone as a completely new piece of theatre, which tells the story of a young woman fighting to make her own place in the world.
James
a note from the director
When James first approached me about directing
May Violets Spring, I was excited. I knew he had been working on it for awhile, and I loved where he was taking the story. The first version of the script I heard was MUCH different than the one now, as he tinkered and added and tried to figure out what story he was telling.
The story he told is one that desperately needs telling - May Violets Spring is, quite simply, the story of a woman finding her place in the world. Parenti uses the lens of Hamlet and his world, a story most are at least vaguely familiar with, to take a journey with this young woman who has to step out of what she believed she should do and be, what society told her she should do and be, and find out what she thinks she should do and be. It's a story that could not be more relevant in 2014, and one that should be told louder and more often than it actually is being told. I am so thankful to be part of telling that story. Wouldn't you like to be part of telling that story, too?
Reesa
![]()