Two tickets for the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare.  Direct by Michael Kahn.  Good April 26-July 6, 2008. Sidney Harmon Hall, 610 F St. NW.

Featuring some of the most sublime poetry of love and loss ever written, Antony and Cleopatra is a dark, intimate portrait of an ill-fated love affair. The play begins two years after the events of Julius Caesar, with civil unrest roiling imperial Rome. The aging Marc Antony, one of the empire’s three rulers, lives a decadent life in Egypt, carousing with Queen Cleopatra. As Rome reasserts its claim on him, Antony struggles between his sense of duty to his country and his consuming love for Cleopatra. Michael Kahn directs one of Shakespeare’s last great tragedies. The Baltimore Sun extolled Kahn for molding the Shakespeare Theatre Company “into the closest thing this country has to Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company.”