Recent National Medal of Arts winner Robert Brustein, senior research fellow at Harvard and founding director of the American Repertory Theater, will have a staged reading of his play The Last Will, directed by Daniella Varon, at 8 p.m. on April 11 at the Modern Theatre at Suffolk University in Boston. There will be a second reading on May 22 at the Players Club in Manhattan. (At a dinner on May 1, the Players Club will induct Brustein and others into its Hall of Fame.)
This is the third play in a trilogy that Brustein has written on the life and work of William Shakespeare. The first of the trio, The English Channel, on Shakespeare's affair with the Dark Lady, Emilia Lanier, was produced by New York City's Abingdon Theatre Company in 2009 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Mortal Terror, the second play, about the Gunpowder Plot and the writing of Macbeth, will be produced by the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in a co-production with the Modern Theatre this September. The Last Will concerns the playwright's return to Stratford near the end of his life, and will be produced by the Abingdon in 2012. Brustein published his first book on Shakespeare, The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare and His Time, in 2009.
