Another f*cking Shakespeare festival? - again!? Yup. We’re back! And damn is our line up killer. Shakespeare sailed through the #metoo movement scot free and no one’s talking about it. Sure, he’s been dead for over 400 years and there were bigger Weinsteins to fry- blah blah blah, you heard all of this last year. You know, in 2024? When the annual New York Shakespeare awards awarded SlayFest NYC’s BEST SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL - who cares if the Public’s Shakespeare In The Park was out of commission. We won and you must’ve heard the news?! 

This year while Twelfth Night was back under the stars, we decided to go to LaMama’s 5th floor rehearsal studios; to the heights of deviousness for Shakespeare SlayFest: Season 2: Skullduggery. Darker, dirtier, skullduggeryer. 6 works in the works, in various stages of dress, and ready to come at you from the depths of 6 writers who have flipped the script and turned it around onto the Bard. 

Join us at LA MAMA in the Great Jones Space - 47 Great Jones St, New York, NY 10012, 5th floor on SUNDAY 9th of NOVEMBER at 2:00pm. Doors open at 1.30pm

Producing Director Carla Kissane (she/her), and Artistic Director Grant Cartwright (he/him) (remember us?!) have curated a collection of sexy and subversive works offended by; or in the least inspired by Shakespeare. Our love of the Bard is our superpower and we want to inspire a curiosity, love and relevancy of Shakespeare in 2025. We also wanna call things like they are.

Shakespeare Slay Fest: Season 2: Skullduggery will present excerpts of 6 works. A weaving of slayage; Hippolyta or Cupid Is A Knavish Lad Thus To Make Poor Females Mad (III.ii) or Fuck Women; Enter Two Murderers; Sonnets and the Self, Hey Nonny Nonny; and If I Sing; plus a short film and talkback All the World’s a Stage, each revealing our collective humanity through challenging the cannon and the idea of the man, or woman - gasp! that resides in the popular, collective and historical consciousness. We take aim at the idea of His elevation and aim to make the works accessible for all. NYC keeps getting into bed with the Bard - Othello, Denzel, Jake, Romeo, Rachel - same old same old. November 9, get in bed with us. We’re a new lay. Slay.