Mission

With Shakespeare as our touchstone, Nevada Shakespeare Company, based in northern Nevada, presents education-driven, humanities-based, language-rich theatre and film works.

Purpose

NSC’s purpose is to serve our patrons, the families of northern Nevada, with a first-rate artistic and educational experience that entertains, engages and educates.

Goals

Our foremost goal is to offer our Shakespeare In School program to every student in northern Nevada. We seek to provide our patrons with the best, most professional theatre experience possible: a great state deserves great art!

Geographic Area Served

We are based in northern Nevada and primarily serve Reno and Sparks; however, last year our programs reached not only Washoe, but the Nevada counties of Storey, Carson, Lyon, Douglas, Humboldt, Pershing, Elko and Nye.

History

In May of 1989, Jeanmarie Simpson founded Daring Explorations Theatre Company,

a professional, ensemble theatre company. The first production was a highly celebrated production of the musical, Quilters, presented at historic St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Virginia City, Nevada. Many more site-specific productions followed in the next decade, and the company grew in size,

financial scope, and artistic reputation.

In 1998, the company's name was changed and the Nevada Shakespeare Company (NSC) was organized by Jeanmarie Simpson, Roderick Dexter, Bob Barsanti and Cameron Crain. Our first productions were Arthur Miller’s Elegy for a Lady, directed by Crain, which played at the Nevada Museum of Art and the Nevada State Museum, Sandra Deer’s lyrical play about William Butler Yeats, Sailing Byzantium, directed by Barsanti, which played at the old Huffaker School at Bartley Ranch, the Fourth Ward School Museum and the Eureka Opera House and a City of Reno sponsored, six actor Hamlet, directed by Simpson.

During Season 2000 and 2001 we seated thousands more patrons at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City than had seen the inside of the beautiful old theatre in the entire previous century! Our diverse programming included musicals as well as Shakespeare: Annie Get Your Gun, Hamlet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, The Music Man, Twelfth Night, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet. We also presented Hal Holbrook and Leonard Nimoy in performances that benefited our humanities-based educational program, Shakespeare In School.

In 2003, NSC collaborated with University of Nevada Las Vegas on The Road to Mecca, and we produced Emma Sepulveda’s Amigas and Simpson’s innovative, four performer King Lear at the Nevada Museum of Art. We kicked off a national tour of Simpson’s original hit play, A Single Woman in 2004. A Single Woman chronicles the life and work of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, and it played over 200 performances in Nevada, Montana, South Dakota, Oregon, California, Arizona and New York, including an Off-Broadway run in May 2005 at the Culture Project.

In 2006 Crain lead a fundraising effort to produce A Single Woman as an independent, educational film. Directed by Kamala Lopez of Heroica Films, A Single Woman stars Simpson, co-stars Judd Nelson and features the vocal talents of Peter Coyote, Patricia Arquette, Mimi Kennedy, Margot Kidder and Martin Sheen with music by Joni Mitchell. Pending the entrance into selected film festivals, the film is expected to be released by November 2008. Spring 2007 saw the expansion of our Shakespeare In School program when we began collaborating with Lakes Tahoe Shakespeare Festival.

In 2008, the E. L. Wiegand Foundation commissioned NSC to create a fresh, new, relevant interpretation of Shakespeare for rural audiences in Nevada, Oregon and Idaho. With this sponsorship, we created Romeo and Juliet (ish), and entertained rural family audiences from Walker Lake to Elko. To this day, our educational and community outreach program has served over 120,000 students in every county in the state of Nevada.

NSC has received financial assistance from a diverse funding stream, including Wal Mart, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Atlantis Casino, Wild Oats and the Gold Hill Hotel, private foundations such as E. L. Cord Foundation, E. L. Wiegand Foundation, Charles Mathewson Foundation, Robert Z. Hawkins Foundation, Carol Franc Buck Foundation, DP Foundation, Reno Tahoe Open Foundation, John Ben Snow Memorial Trust and public support from the Nevada Arts Council, Nevada Humanities, Nevada Commission on Tourism and the National Endowment for the Arts.