Hudson Valley Shakespeare

HVS Mission

Rooted in the landscape of the Hudson Valley, with the plays of William Shakespeare as our touchstone, Hudson Valley Shakespeare engages the widest possible audience in a theatrical celebration of our shared humanity.

HVS Core Values

Excellence, Inclusion, Playfulness, Generosity, Sustainability

HVS Now

Located eighty minutes north of Manhattan, Hudson Valley Shakespeare (HVS) is a professional non-profit theater company that presents a rotating repertory season of both Shakespeare and more contemporary plays and musicals in an open-air theater overlooking the Hudson River. Founded in 1987, HVS’s critically acclaimed body of work is forged from the most essential of elements – actors, audience, language, and landscape. The company’s spectacular 98-acre campus serves as a vibrant hub for the local community, a cultural and educational anchor for the region, and a national model for environmental sustainability in the performing arts. It encompasses publicly accessible spaces where visitors can picnic and walk, rehearsal studios and production shops where artists carry out creative work, and also houses a successful for-profit restaurant and event space, called The Garrison, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit theater company. After 38 years of performing in a seasonal tent, in the summer of 2026, HVS will welcome audiences to its first-ever permanent home – the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center, designed by the celebrated architecture firm Studio Gang. Protected from the elements but open to the landscape, the Scripps Theater Center will be the first purpose-built LEED Platinum theater in the United States.

HVS History

Hudson Valley Shakespeare was founded by Melissa Stern and Terry O’Brien in September 1987 with an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Manitoga, home of industrial designer Russell Wright, in Garrison, NY. O’Brien led the theater for 27 years, directing more than 30 productions, and stepped down as Artistic Director in December 2013. After a nationwide search for his successor, HVS’s Board appointed Davis McCallum as Artistic Director in May 2014. Under McCallum’s leadership, HVS established HVStories, a multi-year exploration of the people, history, and culture of the Hudson Valley, and Full Circle, a community engagement program inspired by 2016’s citizen-driven production of Our Town. In 2017, HVS produced its first ever world premieres — Kate Hamill’s Pride and Prejudice (a co-production with Primary Stages in New York) which went on to be one of the most-produced plays in the country, and Lauren Gunderson’s The Book of Will (produced in partnership with the Denver Center for the Performing Arts). Recent seasons have balanced bold productions of Shakespearean classics with contemporary plays by writers such as James Ijames, Anne Washburn, Madeline Sayet, Whitney White, and Heidi Armbruster. Over the last two seasons, HVS has continued to break ground with new world premiere productions Penelope, a musical re-imagining of The Odyssey; and Medea: Re-Versed, a brand-new hip-hop version of Euripides’ classic, written by Luis Quintero and co-produced with Red Bull Theater and Bedlam.

Critics from the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal have applauded the clarity, energy, wit, and imagination of our productions, and the unique and playful nature of the actor-audience relationship under the tent. By reaching over 35,000 audience members and more than 15,000 students and educators annually, as well as transferring productions to other regional theaters, engaging our community through radically participatory art-making, and connecting with area schools through year-round education programming; the impacts of our work are broadly felt throughout the tri-state region.

 

Hudson Valley Shakespeare

2015 Route 9
Garrison, NY 10524

https://hvshakespeare.org