Newly renovated Folger Theatre presents Reading Room Festival
‘The Reading Room Festival’ at Folger TheatreJan. 25-28201 East Capitol St., S.E. Folger.edu ‘A First Look’ at Ford’s TheatreJan.
26-27511 10th St., N.W. Fords.org The newly renovated Folger Theatre on Capitol Hill is presenting its second annual Reading Room Festival (January 25-28) featuring new Bard-inspired plays by a diverse group of playwrights including Austin Dean Ashford, Jacob Ming-Trent, Carmen Pelaez, and Sarah B.
Mantell. The three-day festival is made up of staged readings and conversations about new works. During the pandemic, playwright Mantell left Brooklyn for the Vermont woods, and it’s there that they fully came out as nonbinary.
Aspects of their play “Everything That Never Happened,” a reworking of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” changed during this time too. “Shylock’s servant Gobbo was a cis-male role in my earlier iterations.
