Cymbeline in the Anthropocene is excited to announce the second production by our collaborating theatres: Montana Shakespeare in the Parks. 

Their adaptation of Cymbeline for performance by eight actors will be directed by Artistic Director Kevin Asselin. The script will be prepared and the production dramaturged by Company dramaturge Gretchen Minton. MSIP will tour 37 performances to an astonishing 33 locations around Montana and neighbouring states between 16 June and 8 Sept. This is the Company's 49th year of bringing free professional theatre to rural and urban Montanans. Their cultural mission is sponsored by Montana State University's College of Arts and Architecture, and by generous regional business and personal benfactors.

In the Company's recent newsletter, Kevin Asselin talks about the excitement of bringing back the theatre's essential role of gathering communities and theatre artists to collaborate creatively in shared local spaces, following the individual isolation imposed by Covid-19 in 2020. He believes that an environmentally oriented adaptation of Cymbeline can explore not only the social and ethical questions raised by the pandemic, but also the wider human corruption of the natural world caused by global capitalism. At the same time, he sees the play celebrating the power of the natural world to re-balance the personal miscommunications that divide Innogen and Posthumus, and the court's misguided policies which alienate the country and lead to war between Rome and Britain.

But that is not the end of Cymbeline's tragicomic story. Gretchen Minton notes that the play's final converging actions of reunion, reconciliation, and regeneration focus attention on the kind of interpersonal care and more-than-human stewardship needed for people to survive the devastation of war or the increasingly calamitous impacts of today's climate crisis. The play's outgoing vision is to collectively envision a revitalized future. 

Kevin and Gretchen will have more to say about the MSIP production in an interview we will post in an upcoming blog on our website, and advertise through our Twitter and Instagram accounts.

So stay tuned!