The Folger’s Reading Room Festival Wknd is Back Jan 22-24, 2026

The Folger Shakespeare Library is tuning up for a lively long weekend as it rolls out the fourth annual Reading Room Festival, running January 22–25, 2026. Equal parts brainy and buzzy, the festival celebrates how Shakespeare is translated, transformed, and thoroughly remixed for today’s stage.

This year’s throughline is music: melodic, modern, and deeply intertwined with the Bard. Four fully staged readings by artists, including Alexa Babakhanian, Alberto Bonilla, Barbara Fuchs, and Marcus Gardley pair DC-heavy casts with post-show chats led by critics and scholars. Think performance with a policy-style debrief.

The festival kicks off with a free opening-night conversation, Shakespeare as a Starting Point, exploring how the Bard shaped Broadway, from Kiss Me, Kate to West Side Story. Family-friendly fare follows, including a Fuente Ovejuna reading complete with a pre-show prop-making party, plus a playful community workshop inviting participants to compose a new song inspired by As You Like It.

Panels, gallery talks, workshops, and parties round out the weekend, bringing artists, academics, and audiences together under one historic roof. Tickets are mostly $20, with student rush options and a limited number of $125 All-Access Passes for those ready to read, revel, and repeat.

Here’s the full schedule for 2026:

DAY 1: Thursday, January 22 7:30pm
Shakespeare as a Starting Point: Shakespeare and the American Musical

Folger Theatre Artistic Director Karen Ann Daniels and Signature Theatre’s Artistic Director Matthew Gardiner lead a lively discussion around Shakespeare’s impact on American musical theater. Exploring the different ways composers have been inspired by Shakespeare’s works, with specific emphasis on Stephen Sondheim, this talk will be accompanied by live performances of selections from Play On!, Kiss Me Kate, West Side Story, and more. Signature’s Director of Artistic Development Anika Chapin joins the conversation.

DAY 2: Friday, January 23 6:45pm
Gallery Talk: “Making Myths: The Legacies of William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, and American Actors”

Guided by Folger Associate Director of Exhibitions Operations Nicole Bryner, visitors will explore the exhibition halls to learn about the ways contemporary portraiture of Queen Elizabeth perpetuated a self-cultivated myth of the monarch, the ways Shakespeare’s life was mythologized in the Regency era, and the ways American Shakespearean actors created mythic selves to leave their own mark on theatrical history. Myths will be busted!

8pm
Staged Reading: Cymbeline: A Telenovela Melodramatic Western

Alberto Bonilla shifts the setting of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline from a mythic Roman-occupied ancient Britain to the American Southwest, circa 1893, at the height of the American cowboy myth, a powder-keg of conflict between class and race: farmers against ranchers, frontier pioneers from the East vs. the Mexican and Indigenous populations. The wounds of the American Civil War are still fresh, and the country is trying to unite with the expansion of the railroad connecting East and West. Focusing on the core family conflicts in Shakespeare’s late romance, this bilingual adaptation features high-stakes drama, gritty fights, and intimate moments—all the twists and turns associated with both Latin American melodramas and Shakespearean tragicomedies. After the performance, Rafael Ulloa, Deputy Publisher of Tiempo Company, will lead a conversation with members of the creative team and cast.

DAY 3: Saturday, January 24 10:30am
Fuente Ovejuna Hands-On Craft

Join in the Great Hall for a morning of crafting. Participants can choose to create their own mini-protest sign or a fashionable sheep headdress—or both! Afterwards, bring your creation to the Reading Room at 11:30am for the world premiere of Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega, adapted by Barbara Fuchs and directed by Kelsey Mesa. This family-friendly adaptation invites young audiences to imagine what solidarity looks like, with interactive elements such as audience participation and songs.This workshop is free for all participants.

11:30am
Staged Reading: Fuente Ovejuna by Barbara Fuchs World Premiere

In the little town of Fuente Ovejuna, life rolls merrily along, with sheep to tend and weddings to plan. But when the Comendador, the town’s governor, decides that everything belongs to him, life is turned upside down. What to do? How to resist? This family-friendly adaptation of Lope de Vega’s Spanish Golden Age classic Fuente Ovejuna invites young audiences to imagine what solidarity looks like, with interactive elements such as audience participation, songs, and crafts to engage children while emphasizing themes of justice, unity, and resistance to tyranny.

2pm
Discussion: Diversifying the Classics

Join Diversifying the Classics founder and director Barbara Fuchs and founding member Laura Muñoz, for a conversation about the project’s mission to uplift early modern Spanish-language drama, related dramaturgical work, and adaptation initiative Golden Tongues. This conversation will be moderated by director Kelsey Mesa.

8pm
Staged Reading: LEAR

Set in San Francisco’s Fillmore District during the 1960s, LEAR reimagines Shakespeare’s tragedy of loyalty, love, and madness as a modern parable about the erasure of a Black neighborhood. Once a thriving center of Black art, music, and culture, the Fillmore becomes the site for a King Lear adaptation about an aging real estate mogul, his three daughters, and the threat of urban renewal. This modern-verse translation by Obie Award–winning playwright Marcus Gardley offers a poetic reckoning with history, progress, and patriarchy. After the reading, award-winning theater artist, novelist, and educator Ifa Bayeza will lead a conversation with members of the creative team and cast.

10:30pm
Lear’s Libations: Reception

Following the performance of Lear, All-Access Pass holders and festival artists gather for food music and drinks.

DAY 4: Sunday, January 25 11:30am
Community Workshop: Seven Ages of Music

Explore the connections between verse and musical rhythm in this participatory, all-ages workshop. Using the famous “Seven Ages of Man” speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, actor and musician John Sygar will lead participants in learning the basic structure of iambic beats in Shakespeare’s text, engaging in a musical conversation, and co-creating a unique and improvised composition.

1:30pm
Conversation: The Two Shakespeares: Myth and Mortal

Folger Director Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper and Folger Theatre Artistic Director Karen Ann Daniels sit down to discuss how Shakespeare is perceived today. Why are so many people compelled by the “authorship” question? How did a working playwright become a mythological genius? And how can we play with perceptions around him and his works to create new meaning?

3pm
Staged Reading: Dark Lady: A Musical Theater Work

What would happen if it were discovered that Amelia Bassano, a Venetian Jew and the first woman poet published in England, was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays? And what if this literary secret was revealed by Elizabethan characters existing in a modern-day alternate reality? Discover the Dark Lady, Shakespeare’s muse in his Sonnets, who has been hiding in plain sight for over 400 years. Alexa Babakhanian’s humorous, whimsical musical creates a dynamic score of beatboxing, hip hop, classical, and pop music to highlight the interplay between these two great dramatists and poets. After the reading, current Folger Long-Term Public Humanities Fellow JaMeeka Holloway, who is an award-winning director, producer, and cultural strategist based in Durham, North Carolina, will lead a conversation with members of the creative team and cast.

5pm
Exit, Pursued by a Beer

The artists and guests say a final farewell to the festival with a traditional toast on the stage.