Austin Tichenor

“Theaters are time machines, and Shakespeare knew it,” writes Austin Tichenor. “Only in the theater can people so persuasively journey from the present to another time and place. It’s an act of collective imagination.”

Shakespeare’s setting of 16th-century Vienna was a stand-in for his own London. Austin Tichenor writes that recent productions updated to the 20th century give fresh historical specificity to the play’s potentially distant and abstract ethical dilemmas.

Shakespeare’s plays—and plays and musicals inspired by him—are always a feature of the Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest performing arts festival. Austin Tichenor shares some of the 40 productions playing in Scotland this August.

60 years after the premiere of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, a new stage comedy is using Stoppard’s absurdist template to explore the fears and struggles of the two main clowns from Much Ado About Nothing.

Austin Tichenor writes about why the behind-the-scenes workings of a Shakespeare theater festival make for such great television in Slings and Arrows and the connections with its sequel-in-spirit American Classic starring Kevin Kline.

From Ellen Terry to Sir Ian McKellen, Shakespearean actors performing solo shows is a time-honored tradition. Austin Tichenor shares a wide-ranging sampling of one-person Shakespeare shows from the past century.

Viewers might be surprised by the number of Shakespearean elements in the miniseries which fictionalizes the doomed relationship between John F. Kennedy, Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette. And they’re not all from Romeo and Juliet. 

We all know that Shakespeare loved twins, but less talked about is how much he adored triplets. Shakespeare understood the power of three and deployed it, perhaps most unexpectedly, says Austin Tichenor, in the comedy As You Like It.

Shakespeare as the creator of heroes is explored in Wonder Man, the newest entry in the vast Marvel Cinematic Universe. Austin Tichenor explores the series’ interest in the power of theater and storytelling over super-powered beings fighting evil.

Shakespeare’s poetry, plots, and characters have inspired dozens of musicals, as well as numerous comic songs and even special cameos. Austin Tichenor explores the musical theater that keeps us humming and brushing up our Shakespeare.

Austin Tichenor takes a look at Chloé Zhao’s film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet, writing that Jessie Buckley’s performance as Agnes is the fiercest and most fully-rounded onscreen portrait of Shakespeare’s wife ever seen.

Austin Tichenor shares three takes on Shakespeare’s Macbeth that focus on the human struggle within the tragedy in new and unexpected ways, including a production at the RSC, a novel about Lady Macbeth, and a film for streaming.