by Christy Rodriguez de Conte
In celebration of Tallahassee’s Bicentennial, the Council on Culture & Arts will highlight a specific artist or organization each month that is the epitome of artistic ambition in our capital city. The spotlight on Anthony Gallo & Southern Shakespeare Company is the Artistic Ambition spotlight for April.
Anthony Gallo finds a connection to the role of Prince Florizell in Southern Shakespeare Company’s 2024 Festival.
This spring, Gallo takes on the role as Southern Shakespeare Company celebrates the renewal of life in playwright William Shakespeare’s redemptive classic, “The Winter’s Tale,” Thursday, May 9-Sunday, May 12, at Adderley Amphitheater in Cascades Park.
Shakespeare is one of the most popular and prolific playwrights in history, with approximately 38 plays.
Traditionally, Shakespearean plays can be divided into three categories: histories, tragedies, and comedies. The history plays fictionalize England’s controversial past in plays like “Henry VI” (parts 1, 2, & 3) and “Richard III.” Classics like “Romeo & Juliet,” “Hamlet,” and the “Scottish Play,” which superstitious theater artists refuse to say aloud, are classified as tragedies due to their complex situations and tragic endings.
In his comedies, like “Twelfth Night” and “A Mid Summer’s Night Dream,” Shakespeare makes light of these complexities through disguises and hidden identities, all ending in a metaphoric and literal jig. Then there are the “problem plays,” so titled due to the difficulty in placing them into one of the three categories.
“The Winter’s Tale” shares the complexities of a tragedy but ends in reconnection and a fulfilling love story. We live in a time when the gray area of what is comical and what is tragic grows greater and greater. Perhaps it is this play’s ability to straddle the two, to find the rebirth of possibilities, that makes it such a fitting story for SSC to tell.
Read more on the Tallahassee Democrat.