Master Mistress: Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Play in Four Acts

Every one of them here: bound to old debts that keep finding new collectors. Loyalties at last shatter into loving betrayals.Master Mistress unfolds throughout seventeen scenes, shaped with forty of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.Here the Bard's original desires, his admitted betrayals, his stripped inheritances, and poetical pleas reveal vignettes teasing out Shakespeare's most personal and only public confession.This is a play about generational secrets finally having nowhere left to hide. A Son, reckless and devoted, follows his foolish heart straight into brief fortune before captivity. His Fiancée, carries the secret that is their unborn and destined bastard. She and her secrets vigilantly shadowed by the oppressive matriarchal regime that is her mistress and mother: Modre. The Son's Father disgraced and struggling against an inexorable legacy he fights to retain.This is a "Shake-Shift" play: a re-purposing of the Bard's poetry enlivened into drama. Deliberately apocryphal, these sonnets cease reciting and now speak familiar as dialogue between persons. Playwright Anthony Abraira restitches these sonnets to serve grounds for insight, reinvention and performance.