Showtime: the Productions
Perhaps the most well known attraction of SSC was the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen, which Artistic Director Paul Whitworth described as "an eccentric fusion of Shakespeare's Globe, Chartres Cathedral, and Middle Earth." The gallery of pictures provides a window into how each of the productions was customized to fit this unique stage and how UCSC transformed, every night, into an intimate theatre among the redwoods.
The gallery of posters – which features every poster from every year –portrays how the festival embraced the surfer-cosmopolitanism of Santa Cruz, incorporated transnational perspectives (the 1984 Balinese-inflected The Tempest), and reflected modern contexts (the 1985 Hamlet as soap opera). But the Shakespearean productions were also grouped by theme and often in conjunction with plays by more contemporary authors. Though unique to their time and setting among the redwoods, most of the productions were recorded on tape for posterity and pedagogical purposes.