The Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Programs kick off their season by breathing new life into two of Shakespeare’s classics. The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's turbulent battle between the roles we play and the people we are underneath, follows the unlikely courtship of cantankerous Katherine and swaggering Petruchio.

“Shrew has a long history of manifesting its message in different ways,” says director Kate Bergstrom. “I’m interested in Shrew as a love story, where two people who are at opposite ends of the extremes meet and, eventually, tear each other’s armor down until they can join together in love.”

After the run of The Taming of the Shrew, a mystical production of The Winter’s Tale follows the banished Perdita, whose fortune changes when she unknowingly returns to her homeland, in love with a prince and unaware of her own heritage.

“I see The Winter’s Tale as a dreamlike journey with death,” says director Salgado. “Through King Leontes, we watch a tightly wound world unravel. Later, through his daughter Perdita, we discover what it is to pursue love in the face of loss and find awakening.”

Performances for The Taming of the Shrew run Oct. 20, Oct. 21 and Oct. 22 at 7:30 p.m., with additional 2 p.m. matinee performances on Saturday, Oct. 22 and Sunday, Oct. 23. Performances for The Winter’s Tale run Nov. 3, Nov. 4 and Nov. 5 at 7:30 p.m., with additional 2 p.m. matinee performances on Saturday, Nov. 5 and Sunday, Nov. 6 at 2:00 p.m.

Kate Bergstrom, currently pursuing her MFA in directing at Brown/Trinity Rep, serves as artistic director of On The Verge Summer Repertory Festival. She served as the head of Drama at Laguna Blanca School from 2012-2015 and Artistic Director of Stripped Scripts.  A graduate of UCLA's School of Theatre, Film & Television with a degree in acting and directing, her thesis production of Woyzeck with an all-female cast was featured as a sponsored department show. She spent the last three years working as an educator, director and performer in the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara areas, bringing theater into classroom curriculum through Laguna Blanca and various non-profits, such as BluePalm.

As an actor, Kate’s work ranges from Medea with Annette Bening to Suzan-Lori Park's 365 Plays/365 Days at Highways Performance Space. Her directorial work centers around performance and the blurred lines between the self and other in relationship to gender, politics and socioeconomic identities. In 2013, she conceived and directed Wholed, a performance about Alexander Haig at REDCAT in the Walt Disney Concert Hall with member Elizabeth Hayhurst of GSF. Most recently, Kate has finished production on The Children's Hour at Brown/Trinity, which will be workshopped again at the Granoff Center for the Arts in December. Her recent assistantships include Richard and Sharon Jenkins for Trinity Repertory's Oklahoma! This summer, after attending La Mama Umbria's director symposium in late July 2016, she directed two shows in On The Verge's second season of new work.

Mauricio Salgado is, among many things, a mischief-maker, early morning riser, organizer, life-ist, educator, artist and joy-wearer. In 2006 he co-founded Artists Striving To End Poverty (ASTEP), an organization whose mission it is to connect performing and visual artists with youth from under-resourced communities in the U.S. and around the world to imagine together, think critically together, and conceive a world without poverty. As ASTEP's Program Director, Mauricio taught and devised with artists of all ages across the United States and in parts of Peru, South Africa and India. He also co-founded the Artist As Citizen Conference, which is hosted by the Juilliard School. As an actor and story-teller, Tafur Salgado has performed in venues throughout New York, Washington, D.C., Florida, California, Germany and Belgium.