For many years, when Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a professional repertory company, staged its performances in the Festival Glen on the UCSC campus, Dickens Universe attendees would walk across Heller Drive from Kresge or Porter colleges on Wednesday evenings to see the play on offer that summer. But in 2013, budget cuts meant an end to that arrangement after 32 years. The company immediately formed Shakespeare Santa Cruz, which several years later found a permanent home in DeLaveaga Park, a 20-minute drive from the campus. There, it is flourishing and continuing to produce its acclaimed summer Shakespeare festival.
Dickens Project co-director Renee Fox also serves as a dramaturg for Santa Cruz Shakespeare, and she wants to re-forge the connection between the two groups. She envisions a “collaboration between the Dickens Project and Santa Cruz Shakespeare that might include talks, events, and presentations available to both of our communities and including scholars/participants from both, a "Dickens" evening during the Dickens Universe when Universe participants would be offered discount tickets for a Santa Cruz Shakespeare performance and invited to a talkback discussion afterwards that focused on Victorian intersections with whatever play we had seen.” She has discussed this with Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s artistic director, Charles Pasternak. Unfortunately, there are no performances during the Dickens Universe this year, although As You Like It and The Importance of Being Earnest will be presented the weekends before and after the conference. For those plays, SCS has offered Dickens Universe registrants a 20% off discount code if they want to buy tickets.
In the future, Fox hopes for a partnership that will allow “Dickens Project folks and Santa Cruz Shakespeare folks to talk together about A Christmas Carol, which SCS is performing this winter, and potentially regularly during the Christmas season in the future.” Fox will serve as one of the dramaturgs for this year's adaptation of Carol, and, she says, her work will include “working with the cast and director on contexts for Dickens's novel, Victorian Christmas traditions, and how the long history of Carol's adaptations have shifted the ways we read and understand the novel.” She hopes this work “will yield opportunities for joint events, either in person or virtual, for Universe and Santa Cruz Shakespeare folks.”
If Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s schedule doesn’t include a performance during the Universe in coming years, Fox said, artistic director Pasternak has suggested that the Carol cast might be able to do a staged reading of the adaptation on campus during Universe week, with a conversation afterward.
A discount code is available for all current regisgtrants, please contact us via dpj@ucsc.edu for the discount code.
