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The Reading Room Festival 2026

Thursday, Jan 22 – Sunday, Jan 25, 2026

Folger Theatre’s fourth annual Reading Room Festival returns with a four-day festival of staged readings, panel discussions, workshops, and community celebrations.

Join artists, critics, scholars, and audience members in a celebration of creative community, as we collaboratively re-envision Shakespeare’s works, explore the vibrant musicality of Shakespeare’s verse, and reimagine the stories crafted by other early modern playwrights.

The best way to experience the festival is with an all-access pass, which guarantees you premiere access to all staged readings, panel discussions, workshops, and community celebrations.

Buy an All-Access Pass

All-Access Pass

All-access passes ($100) are now on sale. Prices will increase to $125 on January 1.

The plays

Cymbeline: A Telenovela Melodramatic Western

Original Concept and Idea by Alberto Bonilla
Music composed by Anthony De Angelis
Adaptation of Shakespeare’s text of Cymbeline by Alec H. Wild
Spanish adaptation of text by Alberto Bonilla
Original Spanish translation of Cymbeline by D. Eudaldo Viver (1884)
Directed by Nadia Guevara

Alberto Bonilla shifts the setting of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline from a mythic Roman-occupied ancient Britain to the American Southwest, circa 1893, at the height of the American cowboy myth, a powder-keg of conflict between class and race: farmers against ranchers, frontier pioneers from the East vs. the Mexican and Indigenous populations. The wounds of the American Civil War are still fresh, and the country is trying to unite with the expansion of the railroad connecting East and West. Focusing on the core family conflicts in Shakespeare’s late romance, this bilingual adaptation features high-stakes drama, gritty fights, and intimate moments—all the twists and turns associated with both Latin American melodramas and Shakespearean tragicomedies.

Dark Lady: A Musical Theater Work 

Book, Lyrics, and Music by Alexa Babakhanian
Directed by Rebecca Martínez

What would happen if it were discovered that Amelia Bassano, a Venetian Jew and the first woman poet published in England, was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays? And what if this literary secret was revealed by Elizabethan characters existing in a modern-day alternate reality? Discover the Dark Lady, Shakespeare’s muse in his Sonnets, who has been hiding in plain sight for over 400 years. Alexa Babakhanian’s humorous, whimsical musical creates a dynamic score of beatboxing, hip hop, classical, and pop music to highlight the interplay between these two great dramatists and poets.

Fuente Ovejuna

By Lope de Vega
Adapted by Barbara Fuchs
Directed by Kelsey Mesa

World Premiere

In the little town of Fuente Ovejuna life rolls merrily along, with sheep to tend and weddings to plan. But when the Comendador, the town’s governor, decides that everything belongs to him, life is turned upside down. What to do? How to resist? This family-friendly adaptation of Lope de Vega’s Spanish Golden Age classic Fuente Ovejuna invites young audiences to imagine what solidarity looks like, with interactive elements such as audience participation, songs, and crafts to engage children while emphasizing themes of justice, unity, and resistance to tyranny.

LEAR

Translation/adaptation/remix by Marcus Gardley
Directed by Hana S. Sharif
Original text by William Shakespeare
Commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “Play On!”

Set in San Francisco’s Fillmore District during the 1960s, LEAR reimagines Shakespeare’s tragedy of loyalty, love, and madness as a modern parable about the erasure of a Black neighborhood. Once a thriving center of Black art, music, and culture, the Fillmore becomes the site for a King Lear adaptation about an aging real estate mogul, his three daughters, and the threat of urban renewal. This modern-verse translation by Obie Award–winning playwright Marcus Gardley offers a poetic reckoning with history, progress, and patriarchy.

Meet the creators

Anthony De Angelis

Anthony De Angelis

Alexa Babakhanian

Alexa Babakhanian

Alberto Bonilla

Alberto Bonilla

Barbara Fuchs

Barbara Fuchs

Marcus Gardley

Marcus Gardley

Nadia Guevara

Nadia Guevara

Rebecca Martinez

Rebecca Martinez

Kelsey Mesa

Kelsey Mesa

Hana S. Sharif

Hana S. Sharif

Alec H. Wild

Alec H. Wild

Past festivals

Over the past three years, the Reading Room Festival has introduced audiences to new plays that have gone on to full-scale Folger Theatre productions, including the world premiere of Lauren M. Gunderson’s A Room in the Castle, a critically acclaimed feminist retelling of Hamlet; Al Letson’s Julius X, which remixes Civil Rights history through the lens of Shakespeare’s tragedy; and, this spring, Broadway star Jacob Ming-Trent’s autobiographical How Shakespeare Saved My Life will be on stage at the Folger in a world premiere production.