A Warehouse, A Cattle Stockyard, and A Business Manager Who Couldn’t Make Payroll.

How Staunton ended up with the only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theater in the world

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

In the fall of 1987, James Madison University professor Ralph Alan Cohen taught a seminar on Shakespearean stagecraft built around Henry V. The following spring he staged it, using a warehouse space dressed up to look like an Elizabethan yard, with student Jim Warren playing the lead and fifteen actors covering every ro…