The Reading Room Festival is a four-day festival of staged readings, panel discussions, workshops, and community celebrations. Shakespeare serves as a catalyst for today's playwrights—in a collaborative community, artists, critics, and scholars unite and actively engage in creating new narratives that speak to our time. Works presented at the Reading Room Festival are each at different points of their creative journey, and a goal of the Festival is that these plays will later be staged at the Folger or regional American theaters. Several Reading Room Festival presentations have enjoyed exciting post-Festival outings.

Schedule of Events:

January 30, 2025

Henry 6
by William Shakespeare
Adapted and directed by Barry Edelstein
7:30pm

In a multimedia presentation, Artistic Director of San Diego's Old Globe Barry Edelstein shares selections and commentary on the process of creating Henry 6.  The Old Globe's adaptation of Shakespeare's rarely produced Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III into a thrilling two-part event featured a cast and crew of over 1,000 San Diegans and over 50 community-based nonprofits and organizations. Charles McNulty of the L.A. Times declared: "This is what Shakespeare for the people really looks like." In the spirit of this community-building epic, this presentation of Henry 6 shows video footage of the production with interactive elements, and the post-show conversation will feature Katie Harroff, Folger's Director of Engagement who previously served as Arts Engagement Director at the Old Globe,  joining Edelstein to discuss their process of inviting communities into the process of adapting and performing Henry 6.

January 31, 2025

Valor, Agravio Y Mujer (The Courage to Right a Woman's Wrongs)?
by Ana Caro Mallén de Soto
Presented in association with Expand the Canon
8pm

This play is a celebration of women's agency, written by Shakespeare's Spanish contemporary Ana Caro Mallén de Soto. Following a scorned heroine determined to carry out a revenge tragedy-turned-comedy, this play includes hallmarks familiar to Shakespeare's writing, including cross dressing, love triangles, swordplay, and soaring verse. Doña Leonora dresses like a man and crosses Europe to get revenge on her ungrateful ex who left her unmarriageable. Along the way, she manipulates others in her sphere causing confusion and antics – and ends up with a triumph that she deems better than any murder.

Expand the Canon researches and celebrates classic plays by historic women and gender-expansive writers — and is a call to action to produce them. They've partnered with and inspired more than 20 companies across the country to teach and perform these works

February 1, 2025

By the queen
by Whitney White
8pm

From her roots as a provincial princess of France, to her ascension to the throne of England and her eventual downfall, Queen Margaret is one of the most complicated, fascinating, and thrilling characters in Shakespeare's works. She is a warrior, a wife, a politician, a mother… and this dynamic new drama, lifted and remixed from the text of Henry VI and Richard III, finally gives her story the telling it deserves.

February 2, 2025

Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
Adapted by Reynaldo Piniella and Emily Lyon
Spanish translation by Christin Eve Cato
Additional Anishinaabe translations by Ty Defoe
4pm

Hamlet is a Black, Latinx prince in this bilingual reimagining of Shakespeare's tragedy, with text infused by the Spanish spoken in present-day New York City.

Date: January 30 - February 2, 2025

Location: Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol Street, SouthEast Washington, DC 20001

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