The Shakespeare Project

In October 1983, the Riverside Shakespeare Company, then New York City's only year-round professional Shakespeare theatre company, inaugurated The Shakespeare Project, based at the theatre company's home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, The Shakespeare Center. The Shakespeare Project was the first major New York residency of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company - with Edwin Richfield, Heather Canning, Christopher Ravenscroft, Jennie Stoller and John Kane (the later two from Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream) - for a week of public workshops, panel discussions, seminars and performances at the company's Upper West Side theatre, The Shakespeare Center. The event was launched at a luncheon in the Shakespeare Room of the Algonquin Hotel attended by Joseph Papp, Helen Hayes, Frank Rich, Gloria Skurski, W. Stuart McDowell, and members of the Royal Shakespeare Company in mid October 1983. According to the New York Times, over one thousand actors, students, teachers and stage directors, from the ages of 15 to 87, signed up for 22 sessions taught by some of the leading actors from London's Royal Shakespeare Company.

At the launching of The Shakespeare Project, Marilyn Stasio of The New York Post, called it "the adventurous Shakespeare Project involving the five guests from the Royal Shakespeare Company...a unique venture." Stasio added, "Everybody at the opening night party, including such members of the theatrical community as Milo O'Shea, Barnard Hughes and Gloria Foster, seemed to want to a regular event of the unprecedented project." In the evenings, the five actor also performed a "five-hander" version of Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice, Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, and the New York premiere of D. H. Lawrence's The Tarnished Phoenix.

The week-long residency drew sell-out crowds at its two venues, the All Angels Episcopal Church at Lincoln Center, and The Shakespeare Center - the home of the Riverside Shakespeare Company, located in West Park Presbyterian Church at Amsterdam and West 86th Street in Manhattan. The Host Committee for The Shakespeare Project included Henry Guettel, Leonard Bernstein, Helen Hayes, Bernard Jacobs, John V. Lindsay, Joseph Papp and George Plimpton.