Kings County Shakespeare Company was founded in Brooklyn in 1983 by Co-Artistic Directors, Deborah Wright Houston and Liz Shipman, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in celebration of the Garden's Shakespeare Day. Our audiences reflect the cultural diversity of our Brooklyn community, a rich and unique population we are proud to serve.
The Company was created to bring gifted, well-trained actors together with the people of Brooklyn. Our mission is to serve Brooklyn and its visitors by presenting well-crafted, affordable and provocative productions of Shakespeare's plays as well as other classics from world literature.
Since classic plays, the most outstanding works of any culture or generation, are an integral part of our worlds collective humanity, we seek to reinvigorate them for a new generation and make them available and accessible to all. For this reason, we produce our annual Shakespeare Festival of two to four classic plays and our outreach programs in often-frequented traditional and nontraditional performance venues: the Prospect Park Bandshell, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and most recently, in our new home at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, which is accessible by public transportation to people in all five city boroughs.
To further support our mission, we utilize the talents of the very best theatre professionals available through Actors Equity's non-traditional casting service and through agent submissions. We offer educational outreach programs for children, teens and adults, provide comprehensive training programs for future theatre professionals and encourage community participation in all our activities.
