KILL CLAUDIO!
by Élise C. Hanson
Set in the unmoored, wibbly wobbly margins of Much Ado About Nothing, Kill Claudio!follows characters caught between comedy and catastrophe. Lovers, villains, constables, and courtiers endeavor to understand how the moral logic of the world they inhabit butts up against their emotional responses to altered expectation. As accusations harden into public judgment and forgiveness arrives too late to erase the damage, Shakespeare’s familiar characters are forced to confront a more unsettling question: who grants humanity to whom? By turns playful, tender, and existential, the play reframes Much Ado as a meditation on performance, punishment, and the brittle authority of social consensus.
- Cast Size: 6M 3W
- Running Time: 90+ minutes
- Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
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About the Playwright
Élise C. Hanson is a playwright and actor from Salt Lake City who has been putting pen to paper since she first figured out what words were. She is primarily an absurdist in philosophy and in humor, and became obsessed with Albert Camus due to countless re-watches of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Selected awards for her dramatic works include several Fringe Festival Awards and the George Plautz Playwright Award. She is the playwright in residence and dramaturg for New World Shakespeare Company and the Artistic Director of Kallisti Theatre Company, a theatrical collective dedicated to works written by and for the talent in Salt Lake City. She works as a commissioned playwright creating bespoke pieces for actors, theatre companies, and educational institutions. Hanson’s plays have been produced, commissioned, and developed in the greater United States by companies and individuals including New World Shakespeare Company, Wasatch Theatre Company, The Hive Theatre Company, Athena Project Arts, Kallisti Theatre Company, Puck’s Rude Mechanicals, and Vegas Theatre Company.
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