Witting won that year’s competition and its $25,000 prize, and the ASC brought her to Staunton, Virginia in January 2019, when her play was rehearsed in their Blackfriars Playhouse (the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre), and again in mid-February, when Anne Page, in repertory with Merry Wives, kicked off the company’s three-month Renaissance season. In 2018, the company invited playwrights to submit work that might respond to and interrogate The Merry Wives of Windsor. These performances-of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Witting’s Anne Page Hates Fun-were the inaugural offerings in the ASC’s “Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries” initiative, which proposes, over the next twenty years, to debut thirty-eight new (and previously unproduced) plays that engage Shakespeare’s thirty-eight in conversation. Each of these specters is a character in a play by Shakespeare or Amy E. The friend who cozens secrets she will not keep appears as I open my office door or hurry to a meeting. As I fix my morning tea, I see the girl who shivers at her teacher’s touch. When I try to remember an early morning dream, I see, over and over again, the woman who foils a flame-faced predator with nothing but her wit. For more than a year, as I pursue my daily life, two razor-sharp yet ghostly performances from the American Shakespeare Center’s 2019 season flare in my imagination.
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