A 16th-century rarity that will shock and delight -- performed in Rider's Pub!

Rider Theatre presents Gallathea, an Elizabethan era play by John Lyly, April 6 through 10. Performances will take place in The Pub at the Bart Luedeke Center on Rider’s Lawrenceville campus. The preview performance is Wednesday, April 6 at 7:30 p.m. Performances are Thursday, April 7 at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, April 9 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, April 10 at 2 p.m. There will be no Friday performance. Preview admission is $9 for adults and $5 for students and seniors. General admission tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for students and seniors. They are available through the box office at 609-896-7775 and online at www.rider.edu/arts.

Debuted before Queen Elizabeth I, Gallathea was written for the “boys companies” popular with the upper class of the time. “It is clear that Shakespeare was familiar with the play,” says Ivan Fuller, director of the production. “Several lines from it later found their way into his own plays and two scenes from Gallathea appear to have influenced some of Shakespeare’s writing: particularly Love’s Labours Lost and Twelfth Night.  You should also be able to see a lot of similarities between Gallathea and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The play is set in a small village in Lincolnshire, England. The people there must sacrifice the fairest virgin to appease the god Neptune. To avoid giving up his daughter, Gallathea’s father orders her to hide in the woods until the day of sacrifice has passed. What follows includes a rollicking battle between the gods, lovers venturing where few had gone before, a virgin-eating sea monster and a very naughty Cupid - all trying to defy or deny destiny. Fuller chose to produce the play in The Pub at Rider to evoke the informal setting in which many Elizabethan-era plays were presented.

Ivan Fuller serves Rider University’s Westminster College of the Arts as professor of theatre, chair of the Theatre & Dance Department and associate dean of the School of Fine & Performing Arts. He teaches courses in theatre history, script analysis and dramatic literature. Before coming to Rider, Dr. Fuller was professor of theatre at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S. D., where he served as chair of the Performing & Visual Arts Department. He was the founder and artistic director of the Bare Bodkins Theatre Company, which produced summer Shakespeare in Sioux Falls. In addition to his work as a director, actor, theatre educator and poet, he is also playwright. Fuller’s play, Eating into the Fabric, was chosen for the Mainstage Reading Series at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in May 2009 where it was awarded a Holland New Voices Award for Outstanding Play. It was also a semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwriting Conference. In July 2009 he served as playwright-in-residence for Summer Literary Seminars in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was there that he completed the first draft of Awake in Me. In 2010 he returned to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he began writing the final chapter of his Siege Cycle, In Every Note, which was a semi-finalist for both the Eugene O’Neill National Playwriting Conference and the Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship competition.