Trustee
this is a truly unique theatre that models the intersection of scholarship and performance, and has so much more to teach us about how these plays relate to the world, then and now.
closing night for the 2022 production of Twelfth Night. The ASC Theatre Camp was in the audience, creating the most riotous, collaborative performance event I’ve ever been part of, with audiences and actors egging one another on to new heights of comic excess.
theatre bring people together, and no theatre does it like the ASC does; the theatre’s radical potential to help entrain empathy, create community, and discover connection through art is unmatched.
Pete Kirwan is Professor and Co-Director of the Shakespeare & Performance MLitt/MFA program at Mary Baldwin University, where he teaches in both the classroom and the rehearsal room. He hails from Merseyside, in the UK, and has been a proud Staunton resident since 2022.
Pete has published extensively on the textual and theatrical history and afterlives of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His major publications include Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha (Cambridge UP, 2015), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Cheek by Jowl (Bloomsbury, 2019), and six edited collections on digital media, audiences, contemporary performance, editorial history, and specific plays, as well as dozens of journal articles and book chapters. He edited Doctor Faustus for the Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, was associate editor of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (Palgrave, 2013), and is currently editing The Winter’s Tale for the fourth series of the Arden Shakespeare.
Pete is the general editor of Shakespeare Bulletin, the leading journal of early modern performance studies, and sits on the editorial boards of Shakespeare and Early Theatre. He is a prolific theatre reviewer, and has reviewed over 800 productions of early modern plays on his blog, The Bardathon, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary in 2026.
Betrayed and cast out, Prospero summons the storm that brings his enemies back into his grasp. Now he has to decide what to do with them. William Shakespeare's The Tempest returns for the Blackfriars Playhouse's 25th anniversary.