Festen (the Celebration)

Opening Night: April 20, 2012
Closing: April 29, 2012
Theater: St. Ann's Warehouse

While the story (adapted by screenwriter Thomas Vinterberg), the structure, and much of the language remain true to the film–a family gathers to celebrate the 60th birthday of the family partriarch–"Jarzyna’s production, with its two long tables laid out at right angles, brings to mind not just Chekhov but a whole range of Shakespeare plays: Hamlet obviously, with its theme of buried family secrets, but even more specifically, Macbeth, with the sense of a ceremonial banquet thrown into disarray through the intrusion of ghosts from the past" (The Guardian).