ETG 2026: Antony and Cleopatra

“He shall have every day a several greeting,
Or I’ll unpeople Egypt”

Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, written in 1607, chronicles one of history’s most passionate and reckless love stories. At face value, this dramatic tragedy traces the dichotomy between the triumvirate-ruled Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt. Yet, the parallels between Egypt and Rome are beyond geography and extend into the tensions between: love and sacrifice; hedonism and duty; affair and matrimony; myth and man.

The ETG 2026 production highlights the political aspects of the play by setting our production at the teetering edge of the Great Depression. Cleopatra’s kingdom becomes a self-indulgent moonshine-ridden dinner party that deals long card games and dances into the dusk of the Jazz Age. Rome is the domain of terse board meetings, senate hearings and frigid negotiations by those seeking to withhold financial and political systems from utter collapse. With a musical landscape that calls back to the 1920s and 1930s, we ask the question often left amiss in considerations of the play: How much can we defend in the name of love?

Content warning: Suicide