COCA Spotlight Images FY22 (23)

COCA Spotlight: Jason Chimonides

by Christy Rodriguez de Conte Friends, Tallahasseeans, countryfolk, sharpen your knives and your wit as you feast on Southern Shakespeare Company’s "A Taste of Rome: Julius Caesar & Dinner Theatre," being presented at the The Moon on…

by Christy Rodriguez de Conte

Friends, Tallahasseeans, countryfolk, sharpen your knives and your wit as you feast on Southern Shakespeare Company’s “A Taste of Rome: Julius Caesar & Dinner Theatre,” being presented at the The Moon on Nov. 17.

The menu, of course, includes Caesar Salad “because how could we not?”

The words of Shakespeare have permeated our culture for centuries, echoing societal inequities and life’s farcical fractions.

Tallahassee Native and Education Outreach Director for Southern Shakespeare, Jason Chimonides, reads and teaches Shakespeare’s words and ideas daily.

“I’m reading Shakespeare on a daily basis. It’s all enriching,” says Chimonides. “I love the characters that articulate things that I feel like are really contemporary and could have been written yesterday. It’s amazing to me; it gives me chills to think someone writing four centuries ago could identify something so specific and personal to me.”

Chimonides received a BA and MFA from Florida State University Theatre and has returned to Tallahassee after a 17-year artistic journey throughout New York City, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, where he worked as a playwright, director, professor, and stay-at-home dad. Currently, he teaches at Florida State University’s Film School as an ‘acting for the camera’ professor. 

Chimonides relationship with Shakespeare began, like many a film viewer of the ’90s, with Mel Gibson’s rendition of Hamlet. The film inspired him to partake in the magic of Shakespeare by performing in A Midsummers Night’s Dream with Cast Theatre, a local Tallahassee youth theatre, and later at FSU in the mainstage production of “The Taming of the Shrew.”

Chimonides recalls the moment that changed his professional pursuits. “That was one of the critical productions, as far as saying, I really love theatre, I want to do this, I want to devote my life to this. I was 19.”

Since then, Chimonides has directed and performed Shakespeare throughout the East Coast, including Southern Shakespeare’s 1998-2000 productions of “As You Like It,” “The Tempest” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Most recently, he performed in the Baltimore Chesapeake Shakespeare Company productions of “The Tempest” and directed a Mini-Midsummer for Southern Shakespeare. 

Read the rest of the article on the Tallahassee Democrat here.

Learn more about the Southern Shakespeare Gallery.