Blaize Adler-Ivanbrook, Amir Arison and More to Star in THE CENCI at Red Bull Theater

Red Bull Theater will continue their OBIE award-winning Revelation Readings Series on Thursday, November 5 at 7:00 PM with THE CENCI by Percy Bysshe Shelley, adapted and directed by Eleanor Holdridge at Peter Norton Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre.

The line-up includes Blaize Adler-Ivanbrook, Amir Arison, Carol Halstead, Anthony Michael Lopez, Jason Sanchez, David Ryan Smith, Derek Smith, Raphael Nash Thompson and more to be announced.

It will be available for streaming on-demand from November 6-15. Open Captions will be available from November 7 until 11:59 PM EST on Sunday, November 15.

This production marks Red Bull Theater’s second staging of The Cenci. The company first presented Shelley’s tragedy in 2008 under the direction of Eleanor Holdridge, with the late Roger Rees delivering a celebrated performance as Count Cenci.

Nearly two decades later, Holdridge returns to the play, reaffirming Red Bull Theater’s longstanding commitment to reviving neglected masterpieces of dramatic literature.

This return production also inaugurates The Romantic Revivals Project, the next chapter in a collaboration between Red Bull Theater and scholars that has been bringing Romantic drama to the stage since 2012.

Through partnerships among artists, scholars, students, and audiences around the world, the project seeks to restore the dramatic works of the Romantic period to performance and public conversation. The project builds upon a longstanding partnership with Red Bull Theater and is enriched by the support and collaboration of the Byron Society of America and the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.

About THE CENCI

In THE CENCI, the great English Romantic poet Percy Shelley transports us to corrupt and sumptuous Renaissance Rome with a ripped-from-the-headlines verse drama, set within the noble household of Count Cenci, a tyrannical patriarch with a virtuous daughter Beatrice.

After two of his sons are brutally killed, Cenci celebrates by throwing a banquet, toasting their spilled blood with wine. Fearful for her own life, when Beatrice pleads protection from their guests and is denied—and when she finds out her lover Orsino has betrayed her for the priesthood—she concocts a desperate plot to take control of her own destiny.

ABOUT THE PLAY

When Percy Bysshe Shelley arrived in Rome in 1819, he encountered one of the city’s most haunting legends: the story of Beatrice Cenci (1577–1599). For more than two centuries, her story had fascinated locals and visitors, awakening what Shelley called a “deep and breathless interest.”

Both Percy and Mary Shelley immersed themselves in the story, and Shelley soon recognized in it the material for what he hoped would become a great modern tragedy. Shelley transformed this Roman legend into a tragedy that asks what becomes of justice when every institution entrusted to uphold it has failed.

Subjected to relentless cruelty and sexual violence by her father, Beatrice is denied protection by her family, the state, and the Catholic Church. Rather than merely recounting a notorious Renaissance murder trial, however, Shelley explores the workings of power, tyranny, and resistance.

At the center of the drama stands one of the greatest tragic heroines of the nineteenth century, whose struggle continues to provoke ethical debates about justice, agency, conscience, trauma, and whether resistance can escape the violence it opposes.