The 2025 Illinois Shakespeare Festival officially opens next week, with the season's two comedies set to premiere and a tragedy following shortly behind them.
William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream launches the festival with a preview on Wednesday, June 25, and opening night the next day. Closely behind Midsummer is the season’s only non-Shakespeare play, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, with a preview on Friday, June 27, and first official performance Saturday, June 28.
Two weeks later, Hamlet joins the trio of productions running in repertory through the summer.
Directors Kim McKean and Vanessa Stalling will make their Illinois Shakes debuts with the Bard’s comedy and tragedy, respectfully. But neither is entirely new to the festival. McKean and Stalling both hail from Central Illinois.
“I have been a patron and a longtime fan for a while,” said McKean, who is originally from Bloomington-Normal. “It’s an incredible community of artists. The people we have the opportunity to work with, from the design team to [artistic director] Robert [Quinlan], to the cast—that’s the thing that’s been a real joy for me.”
Stalling was born and raised in Peoria and attended graduate school at Illinois State University.
“As a high school student, I would often come and see the festival,” she said. “The space is super inspiring. There are so many opportunities for transformation and bringing out the conversation of imagination with the audience. That’s been an inspiring element in the rehearsal process.”
Quinlan has been a fixture at the festival, serving as associate artistic director until John Stark’s retirement in 2024 and first directing in 2013.
In his inaugural season as artistic director, he tackles the festival debut of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
“I find that when I’m in rehearsal, it is such a joy to be focused just on that one play,” he said. “But one of the cool things about the job is to be able to bring in these incredible artists to Bloomington—including these two directors.”
Identity, justice and joy
While the three plays are not produced in collaboration, they share a cast and a few common themes.
“As I was selecting plays, in general, I really wanted to pick shows that I love—because I’m spending a lot of time with them—and also plays that celebrate theater in different ways,” said Quinlan.
Wilde’s Victorian-era satire is a “comedy of manners,” Quinlan said. “And it also is about identity. Characters are shaping their own identity; they’re kind of living double lives and get caught in some problematic situations because of that.”
Wilde subversively references his own questioning of his identity as a gay man at a time when homosexuality was against the law in England.
The Importance of Being Earnest, premiered on Valentine’s Day in 1895, turned out to be Wilde’s last play. A few months later he was on trial, charged with sodomy and indecency. He spent two years in prison and died in exile in 1900.
“Though it is a comedy and it’s all straight characters, he is talking about some really interesting aspects of living life on your own terms and loving who you choose to love,” Quinlan said.
Quinlan is sticking to the traditional setting of a Victorian drawing room, with a Wes Anderson twist inspired by The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar based on a recommendation from Quinlan’s late mentor, Joanna Maclay.
“We are ‘Wes Anderson-ing’ the play a little bit with a nod to some of those highly theatrical and stylized design choices,” he said.
For Midsummer, McKean sets the play's Athenian scenes in a boarding school, with its otherworldly forest being “a dream space” that, aesthetically, is “Burning Man slash House of Yes in Brooklyn, which is this exploration of freedom through punk rock,” she said.
Though quite different in style, McKean’s play draws from the same conceptual well as Quinlan’s.
“There are a lot of themes of identity, of finding your voice in a society that is very constricting, and then how you break free from that society to figure out who you are and what you want to say,” she said. “In our play, Midsummer, they break free in the forest.”
Joy is another theme, McKean said, particularly in how joy is “in negotiation with heartbreak.”
Hamlet might be the outlier, but Stalling said her play is an ideal companion to the others on the season in how it “speaks to the power of theater.”
“There is a major turning point that happens in a ‘play within the play,’” she said. “It really speaks to the power of storytelling and the power of the artform of theater as a way to on an arc toward justice.”
The title character of Shakespeare’s longest, best-known play looks to exact revenge after his father is murdered. Here, the design team keeps pretty close to Shakespeare’s Medieval, gothic setting.
“Hamlet is in pursuit of public justice,” Stalling said. “A wrong has been committed and it’s not enough to have a private moment of revenge. It really is about public accountability. It’s really powerful that a tipping point in that pursuit is done through the artform of theater.”
The 2025 Illinois Shakespeare Festival opens Wednesday at Ewing Cultural Center, 48 Sunset Rd., Bloomington, with a preview of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The festival grounds are open for picnicking each night, with food trucks and pre-show entertainment in the courtyard. For a full schedule and tickets, visit illinoisshakes.com.
