Julie Eccles plays the title role in CANDIDA

We continue our 2011 season with George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, playing at the Bruns Amphitheater August 10 through September 4. Cal Shakes Artistic Director Jonathan Moscone, in a return to the works of Shaw following his critically-acclaimed production of Man and Superman in 2007, will direct.

Candida is Shaw’s brilliant, witty, and trenchant comedy about a morally superior clergyman in turn-of-the-20^th-century London, his enigmatically charismatic wife, and the wildly romantic young poet who puts the very foundation of their marriage to the ultimate test.

”Candida is endlessly fascinating to me as I continue to discover the complex nuances of each character, and of the play’s highly charged circumstances,” says Jonathan Moscone. “Underneath the veneer of Shavian humor and wit is a piercingly painted portrait of the sometimes savage undercurrents running through the veins of the seeming complacency of married life.”

The cast of Candida includes Cal Shakes Associate Artist Julie Eccles (The Pastures of Heaven, An Ideal Husband) in the title role and A.C.T. core acting company member Anthony Fusco (Clybourne Park, Prospero in Cal Shakes’ The Tempest [2006]) as Reverend James Morrell. Others in the cast include Nick Gabriel (A.C.T. core company member; Michael Tolliver in the workshop production of Tales of the City) as Eugene Marchbanks; Alexandra Henrikson (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Hell House at St. Ann’s Warehouse) as Miss Proserpine Garnett; Jarion Monroe (Cal Shakes’ The Tempest and Macbeth [1992]; twenty seasons at Berkeley Rep) as Mr. Burgess, and Nicholas Pelczar (Titus Andronicus, Macbeth) as Reverend Lexy Mill.

The design team includes: Annie Smart (set design), who designed Cal Shakes’ productions of The Pastures of Heaven, Man and Superman, and An Ideal Husband, as well as the Berkeley Rep and Broadway productions of In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play; Anna Oliver (costume design), whose work has been seen throughout the US and abroad, and who designed Nicholas Nickleby and Restoration Comedy at Cal Shakes; York Kennedy (lighting design), who created lighting for Cal Shakes’ The Pastures of Heaven, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Uncle Vanya, among others, and whose work has been seen across the country from A.C.T. to Yale Rep; and Will McCandless (sound design) whose soundscapes have appeared in numerous Bay Area productions.