Madison community celebrates arrival of the First Folio

The stage was set with two lone stools and purple light as audience members waited for Kim and Occhiogrosso to come on stage. (Claire VanValkenburg/Madison Commons)

This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and Madison celebrated with events around the community to prepare for the arrival of the First Folio.

The folio is a book that recorded and preserved 36 of Shakespeare’s plays. The Chazen Museum of Art will be the host site for Wisconsin of the “First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare” exhibition from Nov. 3 to Dec. 11 in the Leslie and Johanna Garfield Galleries. The preparatory celebrations ranged from plays to presentations and were open to the public.

The Madison Public Library hosted a viewing of “Shakespeare Behind Bars,” a documentary about inmates studying and performing Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” and how acting helped them to come to terms with their crimes.

Following the documentary, Claire Mason, program coordinator for the Oakhill Prison Humanities Project, and Zachary Fannin, treasurer for the Jail Library Group, held a question and answer session.

“You can be…seen as more than just your crime; you can be seen as a human,” Mason said. “And that truly is more useful in the step towards getting out than someone deciding in a parole room whether or not you’re fit to enter society, you have to believe you’re fit to enter society.”

The Wisconsin Union Theater held a presentation of “The Pleasure of His Company,” which showcased two founders of the American Players Theater, Randall Duk Kim and Anne Occhiogrosso, performing snippets of a variety of Shakespearean plays.

Audience member Sarah Day has been an actress for American Theater Players for 31 years and said the First Folio is special because it is a script for actors written by actors.

“It’s something that has given us such great literature,” Day said. “It has given us an opening into really understanding humanity and that the legacy of Shakespeare is one of deep insight.”