The Pleasure of His Company
Presented in partnership with The Arts Institute and Shakespeare in Wisconsin 2016: the world premiere of Randall Duk Kim and Anne Occhiogrosso starring in The Pleasure of His Company: Our 40 Year Love Affair with William Shakespeare, an evening of personal recollections, dramatic scenes and stories of Shakespeare's influence on Kim and Occhiogrosso's lives and careers for more than four decades.
The two-character performance piece, conceived and written by Kim and Occhiogrosso for the celebration of Shakespeare’s 400-year legacy, combines performance of signature Shakespearean dramatic scenes with performance pieces that celebrate Shakespeare’s contribution to world literature. The evening is also a tribute to the First Folio, the 1623 collection of Shakespeare’s plays which scholars cite as the most authentic and reliable versions of a majority of the playwright’s texts. The performance is a prelude to the Folger Shakespeare Library’s national exhibition of an original edition of the First Folio in Madison from November 3 - December 11 at the Chazen Museum of Art.
The performance will include signature scenes from Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and many other Shakespeare plays. The performance will be followed by a Q&A session with the artists. It is free to the public with reservations required. Register at go.wisc.edu/shakesaffair_tix.
Randall Duk Kim
On Broadway, Randall Duk Kim has performed in The King and I, Golden Child, and Flower Drum Song. In a career spanning nearly fifty years, he has appeared on stage with the New York Shakespeare Festival in The Jungle of Cities, The Tempest, Pericles and Cymbeline; the American Place Theatre in The Chickencoop Chinaman, The Karl Marx Play, The Year of the Dragon and Nourish the Beast; the Jewish Repertory Theatre in A Majority of One; the Champlain Shakespeare Festival in The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Titus Andronicus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Richard III; the American Conservatory Theatre in King Richard III, Street Scene, The Taming of the Shrew, The Three Penny Opera, Marco Millions and When We Are Married; the Guthrie Theatre in The Pretenders, Teibele and Her Demon, Hamlet and The Marriage; the Singapore Repertory Theatre in Golden Child and ART.
In 1979 with Anne Occhiogrosso and Charles Bright, he co-founded American Players Theater in Wisconsin, serving as Artistic Director and playing such Shakespearean roles as Puck, Titus Andronicus, Petruchio, King John, Friar Laurence, Shylock, Brutus, Malvolio, Falstaff, Prospero, Hamlet and King Lear, as well as Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, Chekhov's Ivanov, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and Moliere's Tartuffe.
Very early in his career, Mr. Kim did one film and a few episodes on the television series Hawaii Five-O, but most of such work has only come within the last 20 years: television credits include Nourish the Beast, Prisoners in Time, The Lost Empire, 100 Centre Street, Thief, New Amsterdam, Cashmere Mafia, Fringe, Elementary and Person of Interest; film credits include General Alak in Anna and the King, The Keymaker in Matrix Reloaded, Doctor Crab in Memoirs of a Geisha, Grampa Gohan in Dragonball Evolution, The Tattoo Master in Ninja Assassin and Master Oogway in the animated franchise Kung Fu Panda. Mr. Kim is a recipient of an OBIE for "Sustained Excellence of Performance."
Anne Occhiogrosso
Director Anne Occhiogrosso received national attention for her body of work at American Players Theatre where she was co-artistic director. An acclaimed director, dramaturg, acting coach and actress, her focus has always been classical theatre with a special emphasis on the works of William Shakespeare. At the American Players Theatre, she directed 16 Shakespearean plays along with works of by Moliere, Ibsen, Plautus and Chekhov. She also performed the roles of The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Gertrude in Hamlet, Natalya in The Proposal, Madame Arkadina in The Seagull, Jocasta in Oedipus Rex and Anna Petrovna in Ivanov, a production which was co-directed by Morris Carnovsky and Phoebe Brand who have served as career mentors to both Kim and Occhiogrosso. She has also taught at the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting and the New York Shakespeare Festival.