Playbill: Toronto Dutch Courtesan

Playbill: Toronto Dutch Courtesan

The Dutch Courtesan, "Marston, John", Dutch Courtesan 2019, Toronto Dutch Courtesan, playbill

Playbill for the production of The Dutch Courtesan (dir. Noam Lior), staged in Toronto, 19-24 March 2019. Includes director, editor, and dramturge notes, full cast and crew bios, and land acknoweldgements. Part of the Dutch Courtesan 2019 project.

Dutch Courtesan 2019 project team

Main image from Gerrit van Honthorst. Smiling Girl, A Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image' (1625), Courtesy SLAM Online collections, Friends Fund, CC0 1.0 https://www.slam.org/collection/objects/1059/

2019-03-19-24, 2019, 1605, 17th century, 21st century

Dutch Courtesan 2019 project team

The Dutch Courtesan, Toronto Dutch Courtesan production (19-24 March 2019; dir. Lior), has Gerrit van Honthorst's "Smiling Girl, A Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image" (1625)

.pdf (7.44MB); original playbill, 12pp (8.5 x 11' folded booklet)

en-CA

Text Object, Physical Object

DC2019-0013

Toronto (CA), London (UK), Luella Massey Studio, 2019-03-19-24, 2019, 1605, 17th century

Director's Note (1); About the Play (1); Editor's Note (2); Dramaturgical Notes (3); Cast (4-7); Production (8-9); PLS & CDTPS (9); Acknowledgements (10).

2019-06-30

2019-03

has Gerrit van Honthorst's "Smiling Girl, A Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image" (1625)

Digital version of print playbill for Toronto Dutch Courtesan (19-24 March 2019; dir. Lior)

Toronto Dutch Courtesan (19-24 March 2019; dir. Lior)

7.44MB, references 12pp 8.5 x 11' (21.5 x 28cm) folded booklet

PDF; paper (original playbill)

Dutch Courtesan 2019 Project Team. 'Playbill: Toronto Dutch Courtesan (19-24 March 2019; dir. Lior)'. DC2019-0013. Dutch Courtesan 2019. Toronto, March 2019. https://dutchcourtesan2019.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/63

Toronto (CA), London (UK), Luella Massey Studio

2019-03-19-24, 2019, 1605, 17th century, 21st century

Materials created by the Dutch Courtesan project team.

Infrequently updated after 2019.

researchers, researchers of early modern drama, university instructors, undergraduate students, graduate students, actors, directors

Post-Secondary, Graduate, Post-Graduate

large-group instruction, small-group instruction, independent research, Performance as Research

[Front Cover]
The Dutch Courtesan by John Marston
March 19, 2019 (preview)
March 21-24, 2019
Luella Massey Studio Theatre

[p1]
Director’s Note
The Dutch Courtesan is a play about cities.
It’s a play about a city that is (justifiably?) proud of its rich mixture of people, accents, goods, and opportunities.
It’s a play about a city that is (understandably?) anxious about all this mixing, and keen to re-establish clear boundaries: between the city and the stews, between courtesans and wives, between proper religion and suspect cult, between low cunning and clever wit, between locals and foreigners.
This tension between celebration of mixture and anxiety about mixture is one of the many links – analogous though not identical – between Marston’s 1605 London and our 2019 Toronto.
Humour establishes these distinctions, but can also destabilize them. A joke, like a circle, has two sides: inside and outside. If you’re not laughing along, the joke may be on you. Marston asks us to laugh at a range of human follies: greed, innocence, ambition, pomposity, pretension – but not equally, and not in the same ways. We hope that you laugh, but we also hope that there are occasions to pause and consider what you’re laughing at, and why.
- Noam Lior

About the Play
The urban landscape of The Dutch Courtesan presents London as a city that simultaneously applauds itself for being a multicultural cosmopolitan metropolis and feels deeply anxious about the place of strangers within its urban landscape. The main plot deals with the treatment of a foreign sex worker whose otherness is partly established through her accent; the sub-plot follows two members of a distrusted religious minority as they are tricked and abused.
The play’s concerns with otherness, gender, sex, religion, and foreignness are all tied to the context of the early 17th century, but are also powerfully resonant in 21st century Toronto. Marston's play is a reflection of the London his audience inhabited, a cynical, often vicious portrayal of a here-and-now. Our production aims to evoke that audience-actor dynamic, and so we are looking to approximate some original conditions, but with a largely modern aesthetic. The aim is to use performance choices, costumes, accents, and casting that link Marston’s London to our Toronto today.
[p2]
Editor’s Note
The script for this production derives from the in-progress Oxford University Press Complete Works of John Marston, for which Erin Julian and I are editing The Dutch Courtesan, based on the 1605 printing. The play represents a new entry into the genre of “City comedy” created by fellow-playwrights George Chapman and Ben Jonson, with whom Marston was to write Eastward Ho! during that year. The genre is a mode of social satire rooted in London life, popular with gentlemen at the inns of court (trendy young lawyers) and written extensively for boys’ companies (in this case, the Children of the Queen’s Revels) to lighten the comedy and remove some of the sting.

City comedy also took aim at class divisions, social-climbing, and Christian sects outside the Church of England; in this play, the target is the Family of Love, a religious group founded by Hendrik Niclaes in the Netherlands during the 1540s and active in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Familists held that religion consists chiefly in the exercise of love, but the English, disapproving of their ideas of community and free speech, assumed that the love was free love, spouse-swapping, and seduction of new converts. The Netherlands, known as the Low Countries, became part of the pun on Dutch women as easily available for sex (low “cunt’ries”), a joke found earlier in Jonson and Donne, among others.

The emphasis on ‘Dutch’ is the loudest voice in the soundscape of foreign accents or dialects, songs, and echoes from other plays that menace or embrace Anglo-Londoners – who express a frequent anti-immigration bias. Some things never change. Franceschina’s Dutch accent is spelled out phonetically in the 1605 printing, but the other accents (Spanish, French, Welsh, Scottish) are mostly implied by word choice or phrasing foreign to a London ear. The other significant foreign aspect of Franceschina is her self-employed status. Yes, she has a bawd, Mary Faugh, but no male pimp in her
premises unless she hires one temporarily (as she does ‘Monsieur Dubon’) for protection only. Her female independence is a threat to English (male) social order.

- Helen Ostovich, Lead Researcher

Helen is Professor Emerita, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, with experience in staging several playwrights of the period. She has published on early playwrights dealing particularly with gender and misogyny, and has edited several plays by Jonson, Shakespeare, Brome, and Shirley. She is the general editor of Queen's Men Editions, online, and organized a major conference on Wilson's The Three Ladies of London (2015) with an extensive website to support research on that play, soon to migrate to QME. She is also one of the general editors of the Revels Plays and founding editor of the journal Early Theatre.

[p3]

Dramaturgical Notes

For actors trained in a classical dramatic tradition where ‘Renaissance’ or ‘early modern’ largely denotes ‘Shakespeare’, a Marston play provides particular challenges. The first substantial hurdle is the language. Marston’s metre switches abruptly from imperfect iambic verse to irregular prose. Then there’s the puzzling Marstonian syntax (‘that I only might only love him’); the Marstonian neologisms (‘catastrophonical’); and the Latin expressions Malheureux, Freevill, and Cocledemoy, sprinkle generously into their speech (in a manner characteristic of the young lawyers-in-training at London’s Inns of Court who would have been frequent attendees of the Blackfriars theatre – Marston himself was an ‘Inns of Court m[a]n’). And of course, there’s Franceschina’s stage Dutch, Cockledemoy’s faux Greek (‘hadamoy key!’), and all the other accents scattered through the play. Making meaning of this dense polyphonic text presents a significant challenge to modern actors who are also striving to make the play speak to a contemporary audience.

In rehearsal we have wrestled with difficult questions: what is Marston’s satire levelled at? What, exactly, is The Dutch Courtesan saying about sex workers, foreigners, crime and punishment? Who are these people in modern-day Toronto? How do we represent the characters’ extremes of virtue and vice sympathetically while also holding them up to scrutiny or laughter?

We can make sense of Marston’s play within the genre city comedy (a genre in which Shakespeare never wrote, which can feel unfamiliar to modern actors and audiences). City comedy deals with the ethics of living in the complex competitive, overpopulated hurly burly of the city. Marston’s play, with its many voices and modes of language, its contradictory morality and characters, and its sudden tonal shifts, reflect the vibrancy and chaos of the mass of urban humanity. The Dutch Courtesan may be a messy and cacophonous play to stage, but its messiness is what makes it so rich.

- Erin Julian

Erin Julian (PhD, McMaster, 2014)’s research focusses on sexual violence in early modern drama. While her most recent work explores representations of rape in contemporary productions of Shakespeare, she is also particularly interested in the plays of Ben Jonson and John
Marston. With Helen Ostovich, she is co-editor of The Dutch Courtesan for Oxford Univeristy Press’s forthcoming Complete Works of John Marston for Oxford (Gen Eds Martin Butler and Matthew Steggle. The script for this production is based on this new edition. She has also published with Bloomsbury and Early Theatre.

[p4]

Cast

Megan Adam – Mistress Mulligrub

Megan Adam is a Toronto-based performer. She did her training at Randolph College and since then has performed in many new works in Toronto indie theatre, as well as classical theatre and
some TV/film spots. For PLS, she was last seen as a virgin dying on a mountaintop (Hirena in Dulcitius) and travelled with the company to the Kalamazoo Medieval Theatre Festival. She will be battling it out with the first folio in Spur of the Moment Shakespeare Collective’s Shakesbeers
ShowDown! You can catch her performing improvised theatre a few nights a week at comedy hubs like Bad Dog Theatre and Comedy Bar. Follow her on her website meganlynadam.com.

Alan Belerique – Master Mulligrub

Alan Belerique is a Toronto improviser who has studied with Second City, Bad Dog Theatre and New Yorks UCB. He has improvised in numerous shows including the Toronto Improv Festival, Festival of New Formats, Bad Dog's Globehead and Del Close Marathoz in New York. An accomplished actor, he has also performed in P.L.S. Theatre's production of To Seek a Child, A Christian Turned Turk and the lead in A Medieval Christmas. He wrote and starred in The Roommate, for the Fringe Festival and is the lead in “Hey '90s Kids, You're Old” which is touring across North America. Catch him around town, including at his monthly Social Capital Theatre improv party show Connect Four-ty!

Cheryl Cheung – Lionel/Constable/Servant

Cheryl Skylar Cheung is a freshman studying criminology and sociolegal studies and political science at the University of Toronto. She serves as a staff illustrator with her on-campus newspaper The Varsity and is a Government of Canada History Awards Recipient. The Dutch Courtesan is the first play she ever participated in. She hopes you will enjoy the show as much as she enjoyed being part of the cast. Currently, she lives in a cozy town-home with her mother and dog, Haidyn, where the three enjoy homemade dinners and exhausting games of fetch together. In her spare time, she writes poetry and makes soaps by hand. You can find her all hours of the day at cherylskylar.com.

Daniel Coo – Cockledemoy

This is Dan's (UTSC 82) first production with PLS. After a career in education, Dan returned to performance, and can be seen in Films Salvage, Offworld and 30ish, web series The Waddling Dead
and Petrol 2-GTA, television Paranormal Survivor and Scariest Night of My Life, and heard in upcoming episodes of the podcast The Program. He won an ACT-CO Thea award for Leontes in
Much Ado About Nothing. Stage work include the Toronto Fringe, musicals Mute: The Musical and Ned Durango, and Verve Theatre's Sylvia. Many thanks the worshipful Noam and Linda for guidance through the murky and lewd world of The Dutch Courtesan. Hang toasts!

[p5]

Andrew Eldridge – Freevill

Andrew Eldridge grew up in the small town of Fort Frances Ontario. It was here that he discovered his passion for music and drama. Eldridge performed from a young age; taking part in the Rainy River District Festival of the Performing Arts as early as age eight and involving himself in the Fort Frances High School musical productions for four consecutive years. Upon taking a year off from school Eldridge enrolled in Randolph College for the Performing Arts and graduated in August 2018 from the triple threat program. Most recently he has been seen as Carl-Magnus in A Little Night Music directed by Thom Allison at the Randolph Theatre and Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens directed
by Carley Churchill and Danik McAfee at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.

Carmen Kruk – Beatrice

Carmen is thrilled to be part of her first show with PLS! She is a graduate of the University of Toronto and spent the last year studying collaborative creation methods at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She is a founder and co-artistic producer of Off-Key Productions and is currently redeveloping their verbatim play What She Said. Recent credits include: Dreams (ENSEMBLE: Canadian Rep), Mr. Donaldson (RCSSD), Church of the Seven Noses (RCCSD), What She Said (Off-Key Productions) and Pericles (UofT).

Breanna Maloney – Crispinella

Hailing from Markham, Breanna is a Toronto-based actor, singer and theatre creator. Recent theatre credits: Ophelia in Hamlet(s) (Skipping Stones Theatre), B in Crave by Sarah Kane (Pure Carbon Collective) and Rachel in Perfect Wedding (Markham Little Theatre). Breanna is a graduate of the
University of Windsor’s BFA acting program and East 15 Acting School’s MFA theatre program. Much thanks to Noam, Linda and the wonderful cast and crew of The Dutch Courtesan!

Andrew Merzetti – Sir Lionel Freevill/Musician

Andrew is very excited to be out of jail. He's never been in jail but has heard it's no party. He's also excited to re-join PLS for about the tenth time, having pretended to be many centurions,
monks, and Enobarbuses in his time. He thanks Noam, Linda, Glenna, and Paul, and especially the rest of the cast for making him look so good in comparison, LOL J/K winky face. Andrew
is one half of the folk rock and mountain music duo William & Polly with wife Denise Anderson, and he now offers cut-rate but mildly effective tutelage in the arts of guitar pulling, ukulele confronting and banjo despair. Hit him up!

[p6]

Scott Moore – Sir Hubert Subboys/Musician
After training at the Ryerson Theatre School, Scott has performed in numerous shows in Toronto, including a number of PLS productions including The York Cycle, Second Shepherd’s Play and the title role Mankind. Other favourite roles include Hitler in Mein Kampf and Deflores in The Changeling (Drama Centre); Master Ford in Merry Wives of Windsor, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, and
Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream (Alchemy Theatre); Goldberg in The Birthday Party and Ernest in The Anger in Ernest and Ernestine (Rhino Productions); and Cassius in Julius Caesar and Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet (Hart House Theatre).

Flora Quintus – Franceschina

Flora was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary. She had been living in Germany, when she was accepted to The National Theatre School in Montreal, so she moved to Canada in 2009. After graduating she was working as a full-time dance teacher until she left the country to reconnect with her family in Hungary. She spend almost 3 years there, working in film production, but the time
came when she couldn’t stand being behind the camera anymore and took the decision to come back to Canada and focus on nothing else, but her career as an actor. She loves Toronto more and more every day.

Anjali Rai – Mary Faugh/Holofernes

Anjali was last seen in Clown Scenes in the Distillery District and before that the Hamilton Fringe production of The Blue Bird and the Scarborough Theatre Guild production of Tartuffe. She was also in The Creases In My Sari at the Alumnae Theatre. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre from UBC. In addition to being a theatre actor, she also does film and television. Anjali is excited to
be a part of The Dutch Courtesan and wishes to thank Noam Lior and Linda Phillips for giving her the opportunity to find her inner pimp. “I could not ha’ sold your maidenhead oft’ner than I ha’ done.”

Ross Slaughter Caqueteur/Burnish/Constable/Servants

Ross is a first year PhD student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies at U of T. His research focuses on looking at internet memes through the lens of drama, theatre, and performance studies. Ross' involvement with the play comes from a love of history and a desire to stay involved with theatre practice even while drowning in PhD readings. He'd also like everyone to know that his Caqueter costume was pulled entirely from his own closet.

[p7]
Elvira Tang – Nurse Putifer/Constable/Servant

Elvira is an undergraduate student at University of Toronto. She has performed in theatre productions throughout high school. She has always been a part of the performing arts
whether singing, dancing, acting or modeling. Elvira is thrilled to be returning to the stage as the caring nurse, Putifer. This is her first time to play a character that is not “evil”. She often impressed the audience by playing a mean and sassy girl. The last time she graced the stage was Spamalot in 2018 as the French Taunter. She is always open to new challenges. She would like to thank her family and friends for supporting her, as well as the cast and crew for being such a pleasure to
work with.

Victoria Urquhart – Tysefew

Victoria is an actor and director born and raised in Caledon and trained in the University of Windsor's B.F.A. Acting Program. She is also the artistic director of the Spur-Of-The-Moment Shakespeare Collective and the Curator for the Shakespeare-In-Hospitals Program. She is a Toronto
fringe-frequenter, having come off of a well-received run of Chameleon Productions’ The Girl In The Photograph (3 N's from NOW magazine and Mooney on Theatre's Hot Ticket list). Other credits include: Sheri in Theatre Artaud's Grab 'Em By The Pussy, Crystal in Theatre By The Bay's The Five Points, and Pompey in Thought For Food Theatre's Measure For Measure. She is very excited to get to explore The Dutch Courtesan and to play Tysefew. Film appearances include: Nicole in Bristow Globe Media's Haunted Hospitals, Lauren in Blackout Media's That's Not Me (Blood
In The Snow Festival). You can find her dancing in youtube commercials very soon. Follow her on twitter and instagram at: @G_nitenet .

George Worrall – Malheureux

George studied drama in his hometown of Dublin, Ireland and has also attended the Stella Adler Studio in New York City. He has spent many years working on both stage and screen in Ireland, New York, and within Canada, including a run this past summer at the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. George is also a talented musician and songwriter, playing guitar, mandolin, bass, keys and banjo.

[p8]
Production
Erin Julian & Helen Ostovich Editors & Organizers

David Klausner Project Funding

Professor emeritus of English and Medieval Studies at University of Toronto, David taught for forty-five years in the Department of English and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, specializing in Old and Middle English, Middle Welsh, and Theatre History. For the project Records of Early English Drama he has edited the collections for Herefordshire, Worcestershire, and Wales, and is presently completing the collection for the North Riding of Yorkshire. He has been involved with PLS since 1967 and is presently chair of the Board of Directors. For his many sins he is still teaching.

Noam Lior Director

Noam is one of the co-founders of Shakespeare at Play, and works as the project’s dramaturge, editor, annotator, and occasional performer (playing older male roles when better actors are not
available). Noam is an alumnus of the University College Drama Program, and a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, working on a dissertation about digital multimedia Shakespeare editions. He also works as a director and dramaturge (sometimes even on non-Shakespeare plays!), is serving as dramaturge and judge for Spur-of-the-Moment Shakespeare Company’s ShakesBeers Showdown, and – if the gods of bureaucracy are kind – will be defending his dissertation in May, 2019.

Linda Phillips Producer & Costume Designer

Linda is the Artistic Director and Resident Designer of Poculi Ludique Societas, which has been producing medieval and early modern drama for over 50 years at the University of Toronto, including many co-productions with CDTPS. Linda is involved in all PLS productions, generally as designer and producer and sometimes as director. Most recently she has produced, directed, and designed three plays for PLS: Dame Sirith (July 2018), The Second Shepherds' Play (December
2017), and Dulcitius (Spring 2017).

Paul J. Stoesser Lighting Designer

With this presentation of The Dutch Courtesan, Paul continues his long association as production designer with Poculi Ludique Societas which predates the original PLS staging of the Chester Mystery Cycle. Among his several PLS creations some memorable ones include the entirety of the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men research project; A Christian Turn’d Turk; New Custom; Clyomon and Clamydes; The True Tragedy of Richard the Third; Amin_a; as well as numerous pageants for both the York and the recent re-staging of the Chester Cycles of Mystery Plays. Dr. Stoesser, a charter member of the Canadian Institute for Theatre Technology, is Technical Director of the Graduate Program in the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto where his responsibilities include praxis-based teaching in scenography and theatre production.

[p9]
Production
Denise Anderson Choreographer

Dance/Choreography: Oliver! (Centaur Theatre/Dance Captain); Kiss Me Kate (McMaster Musical Theatre/Choreographer); performer with Dave Wilson's dance/theatre ensemble, The Parahumans. As an actor, Denise has performed on stages across Canada. She has also created/produced two original plays (The Amazing Fox Sisters, with Phat Phoenix Productions; Shapeless, with Weird Sister
Productions). She is a Nia movement instructor, half of the folk duo William & Polly (with husband, Andrew Merzetti), and the Student Outreach & Education Coordinator for Mirvish Productions. Many thanks to Noam, Linda, and the cast for sharing this great experience with her.

Andrew Merzetti Composer
Glenna Sims-Bonk Stage Manager
Kristen Kephalas Front of House Manager
Christopher Sutherland Theatre Technician
Tiffany Yaw Theatre Technician
Nicole Eun-Ju Bell Production Assistant
Kristen Kephalas Production Assistant
Holly Wiersma Production Assistant
Tara Costello Production Assistant
Rachel Andrade Videographers
Jonathan Choi Videographers
Sam Qingyue Zhu Communications & Programme Editor
Aidan Flynn Graphic & Poster Designer


PLS & CDTPS

PLS (Poculi Ludique Societas) sponsors productions of early plays, from the beginnings of medieval drama to as late as the middle of the seventeenth century. The group had its origins in 1964-65 in a seminar on medieval drama conducted at the University of Toronto. For more than fifty years, PLS has been associated with the university’s Centre for Medieval Studies, offering a regular schedule of
plays every year. Now, as part of the Centre for Performance Studies in Early Theatre, PLS operates in affiliation with the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. PLS has toured in Canada, the United States and Europe. PLS also collaborates with the theatre history research project Records of Early English Drama (REED) at the University of Toronto.

[p10]
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge that the land on which the University of Toronto operates has for thousands of years been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, Anishnaabe, Haudenosaunee, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. This land is covered by the Dish With One Spoon treaty, a covenant between several Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee nations to share the land in peace. Since then, all newly arrived peoples have been invited into this covenant, but the land hasn’t always been justly shared by those who came afterward. While it is tempting to think of the city’s indigenous history as remote in time and in space, the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto is virtually around the corner, at Bloor and Spadina, linking these histories to the ongoing activities and needs of a living community. Immediately to our west, the Centre for Indigenous Studies connects these histories and communities to the academic and institutional life of the University of Toronto.
Within Toronto’s settler history, this neighbourhood and this building are themselves part of narratives of immigration, exclusion, community-building, and mixedness. The theatre we perform in has been a Lutheran church and then a Russian Orthodox church, and was a centre of Toronto’s Russian community from the 1930s to the 1950s. The surrounding neighbourhood was home to one of Toronto’s oldest Jewish communities (my grandmother’s family had their first home just south of us), before becoming the city’s second Chinatown (“Old Chinatown” as opposed to “First Chinatown”). The interweaving of these histories can be seen in the Cecil Street Community Centre, a building which serves the neighbourhood’s largely Chinese population, but whose renovation carefully preserved aspects of its origins as an Orthodox Jewish synagogue. More recently, this neighbourhood has served as an entry point for “strangers and aliens” of various kinds, migrating to the city centre from the suburbs, from around Canada, and from around the world. Stories like Franceschina’s, or the Mulligrubs’, are never as far away as we might wish.
Poculi Ludique Societas would also like to thank Chris Mentis Associates, Classic Restoration and Woodworking, Chris Warrilow and Fantastic Creations, and John McKnight for all of the support. We acknowledge particularly for stage props from the much earlier Drama Centre production of Vanek. We gratefully acknowledge support from SSHRC, the University of Toronto, the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, McMaster University, and Edward's Boys.
We dedicate this production to the memory of Luella Massey. It’s not the same without you, Lou.

[Back Cover]
The mission of Poculi Ludique Societas is to rediscover the theatrical traditions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance through textual research and dramatic experimentation, and to bring those traditions to life for contemporary audiences of all ages.
PLS produces plays from the period of approximately 1100 to 1650, and has been in the forefront of the rediscovery of the dramatic riches of this period. While the plays of classical Greece and Rome and those from Shakespeare’s time are performed with some frequency, the great dramatic tradition of the intervening centuries has traditionally been ignored. For more than five decades PLS has performed some of the most vivid, powerful, and popular theatre in our heritage.
CDTPS offers broad, rich, and rigorous academic programs for undergraduate and graduate students and is located in the downtown core of Canada’s largest city, the perfect place to experience and to become involved in all kinds of performance. As a part of Canada’s largest university with one of the best research libraries in North America and one of the finest faculties, it has three performance venues available for use by students and faculty in their creative and intellectual exploration, all supported by our technical and production staff. This is the place where you can meet some of the best scholars and artists in the world.
PLS is grateful for your participation in this performance. If you would like to support the growth of the company and its future events, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or graciously tip us a donation on CanadaHelps for the love of Medieval and Early Modern drama.
plspls.ca
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cdtps.utoronto.ca
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instagram: @cdtps_uoft