CSF Receives Gifts from Opaline Fund

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is proud to announce two new gifts from the the Opaline Fund of San Francisco.

A $15,000 gift to support our new American history play project: The Making of America: The Shakespeare Theatres Respond to the American Dream. CSF and Shakespeare & Company (Lenox, MA) are collaborating on an ambitious project to co-commission and co-produce a cycle of plays about the history of our nation. Shakespeare’s history cycle offers a parallel: in 10 plays, covering 350 years of English history, the Bard told the story of his homeland, using historical subject matter to speak to his countrymen about their own times. Many American Shakespeare festivals do produce original works today, but few have made a commitment to develop new work on a large scale that is comparable to Shakespeare’s. By commissioning and developing a cycle of plays about American history, we seek to explore what it means to be American today – to understand on many levels the times in which we live.

A $40,000 gift to support CSF's first cultural exchange program. CSF embraces the vision set forth by the University of Colorado Chancellor Philip DiStefano in Flagship 2030, which identifies several core initiatives. CSF fits into three of those initiatives: Learning for a diverse world; Serving Colorado, the community and our graduates; and Building Global Crossroads. These three initiatives strive to provide diversity and access to educational and cultural opportunities for our community and alumni. CU promises to bring the world to CU and CU to the world, through a new center for global studies and an expansion of student and faculty exchanges around the world. CSF provides high-quality theatre to the community each season. As we continue to improve in our Shakespearean productions, we have begun to introduce American classics as well. The response has been tremendous, but CSF’s long-term goals are to bring in more cultural diversity through an international cultural exchange. Producing Artistic Director Philip C. Sneed is dedicated to enriching our community and company by developing CSF’s first cultural exchange project. Having been extremely successful in the past with an exchange at the Maxim Gorky Theatre in Vladivostok, Russia, Mr. Sneed will revive a specific project with the Gorky Theatre for Summer 2011.