Arthur

Arthur tickets now on sale!

Shows March 22 - April 7. Click below to purchase!

(www.smarttix.com)

All performances at TBG Theatre
312 West 36th Street NYC, 3rd floor.
(just west of 8th Avenue)

Friday March 22 @ 8pm
Saturday March 23 @ 2pm and 8pm
Sunday March 24 @ 2pm

Wednesday March 27 @ 7pm
Thursday March 28 @ 7pm
Friday March 29 @ 8pm
Saturday March 30 @ 2pm and 8pm
Sunday March 31 @ 2pm

Wednesday April 3 @ 7pm
Thursday April 4 @ 7pm
Friday April 5 @ 8pm
Saturday April 6 @ 2pm and 8pm
Sunday April 7 @ 2pm



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The Guerrilla Shakespeare Project is proud to announce the world premiere production of THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A PLAY BY ARTHUR PHILLIPS. Having always approached Shakespeare's texts as if they were new work, Guerrilla Shakespeare is ecstatic to hold the exclusive rights to the first "Shakespeare" premier in over 400 years.

GSP originally hosted a sold out reading of acclaimed author Arthur Phillips' play at The Public Theater last summer that American Theater Magazine called a "full-throttle reading" of a "swashbuckling, blood-and-guts five-act history play". Mr. Phillips was so impressed by the reading that he has agreed to collaborate with Guerrilla Shakespeare, and together we will create a full stage production of THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR in New York City. "If Shakespeare had just finished a new play in 2011, I am confident that GSP is the company he would turn to for the premiere." says Phillips.

THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR centers around the discovery of a lost Shakespeare play and the doubts surrounding its origins. It is an evening of fraud, forgery and illegitimacy, and the story of King Arthur from the Bard's point of view. It is an epic tale of war, love and the audacity (folly?) of peace. "There's only war. 'Tis man's inheritance." (Act IV, Scene I)

King Arthur is a play full of Shakespeare's language, poetry, insight, drama, beauty, and history; yet it's not by Shakespeare. But then again, even Will didn't know he was "Shakespeare". "What man knows aught of his chronicle?" (Act V)

Does our birth decide our destiny? Can a bastard be a king? Can a modern man write Shakespeare?



Reviews of the novel:

The New York Times
The Daily Beast




About Arthur Phillips

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. His first novel, Prague, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and received The Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His second novel, The Egyptologist, was an international bestseller, and was on more than a dozen "Best of 2004" lists. Angelica, his third novel, made The Washington Post best fiction of 2007 and led that paper to call him "One of the best writers in America." The Song Is You was a New York Times Notable Book, on the Post's best of 2009 list, and inspired Kirkus to write, "Phillips still looks like the best American novelist to have emerged in the present decade." His work has been published in 27 languages, and is the source of three films currently in development. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.




American Theater's article on our reading at the Public Theater

Published: July, 2011
The six-year-old Guerrilla Shakespeare Project, devoted to making the Bard’s hoary old plays seem as fresh as if they were written yesterday, has gotten hold of one that was, more or less. It’s The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain, a swash- buckling, blood-and-guts, five-act history play allegedly penned in 1597, somewhere between Richard III and Love’s Labour’s Lost, then lost, alas, to posterity. “Allegedly” is, of course, the key word: The play, as Guerrilla artistic director Jordan Reeves happily admits, is a big fat fake. That didn’t stop Reeves and his company from offering a full-throttle reading of Arthur at New York City’s Public Theater in mid-May. “We approach every Shakespeare play as a new work, looking for the ways it relates to our times—and here’s an actual new work that asks the same questions about Shakespeare that we do.” The counterfeiter of this faux classic is Brooklyn-based author Arthur Phillips, whose novel The Tragedy of Arthur (which consists of the meticulously imitative script, along with an ostensible intro that stretches on for some 256 pages) occasioned breathless raves when it was published by Random House earlier this year. It was novelist Phillips who approached Reeves and company cold, well before the publicity broke, asking the director to read the “lost” manuscript and advise him as to whether it might be genuine. Reeves caught on—“It has a kind of contemporary arc that Shakespeare didn’t follow,” he detected—but he was knocked out by the imitation’s technical prowess and Shakespearean scope. Now he and Phillips have joined forces. With the author’s go-ahead— something he’s never had from W.S.—Reeves and his ensemble are embarking on a full production of Arthur, expected some time in the fall. No problem that the play’s a fake? “Not at all,” Reeves says with assurance. “This is taking us into new and untested territory.”