The Reading Room Festival is a four-day festival of staged readings, panel discussions, workshops, and community celebrations. Shakespeare serves as a catalyst for today's playwrights—in a collaborative community, artists, critics, and scholars unite and actively engage in creating new narratives that speak to our time. Works presented at the Reading Room Festival are each at different points of their creative journey, and a goal of the Festival is that these plays will later be staged at the Folger or regional American theaters. Several Reading Room Festival presentations have enjoyed exciting post-Festival outings.

Schedule of Events:

Valor, Agravio Y Mujer (The Courage to Right a Woman's Wrongs) 
by Ana Caro Mallén de Soto
Presented in association with Expand the Canon
8pm

This play is a celebration of women's agency, written by Shakespeare's Spanish contemporary Ana Caro Mallén de Soto. Following a scorned heroine determined to carry out a revenge tragedy-turned-comedy, this play includes hallmarks familiar to Shakespeare's writing, including cross dressing, love triangles, swordplay, and soaring verse. Doña Leonora dresses like a man and crosses Europe to get revenge on her ungrateful ex who left her unmarriageable. Along the way, she manipulates others in her sphere causing confusion and antics – and ends up with a triumph that she deems better than any murder.

Expand the Canon researches and celebrates classic plays by historic women and gender-expansive writers — and is a call to action to produce them. They've partnered with and inspired more than 20 companies across the country to teach and perform these works

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