Blackfriars Playhouse

Most people picture Shakespeare's plays at the open-air Globe, but his company also performed in a covered indoor theater in London called the Blackfriars, a former monastery hall that let them play through winter and in more intimate conditions. No drawings of that original interior survive, so the Staunton playhouse was designed from scholarly research into how such Jacobean indoor theaters were built and used.

Completed in 2001 in the heart of downtown Staunton, the playhouse recreates the timber framing, the wooden galleries, the tiring-house doors, and above all the lighting and staging conventions of the age. The result is not a museum piece but a working theater, faithful enough to the original that scholars and actors study it, yet alive with a full professional season of plays every year.

The single most striking thing about a show here is the light. In Shakespeare's day there was no way to darken a house and spotlight a stage, so actors and audience saw one another the whole time, and plays were written with that shared light in mind. The Blackfriars honors this with universal lighting, keeping candle-style chandeliers glowing over the entire room from start to finish.

That one choice changes everything. Actors can catch a spectator's eye, play a joke directly to the crowd, and read the room in real time, while the audience becomes part of the world of the play rather than a hidden mass in the dark. Combined with the small size of the hall, it produces an intimacy and immediacy that many people find revelatory, the way theater felt before electricity.

The company that calls the playhouse home grew out of a touring troupe founded in the late 1980s with the mission of performing Shakespeare using the staging conditions of his own theater. That approach, fast-paced, musical, and played in shared light with minimal scenery, became its signature, and the building of the Blackfriars gave the company a permanent home worthy of the idea.

Today the American Shakespeare Center mounts a year-round season of Shakespeare and other classic and contemporary plays, alongside education programs and a long-running touring company. The actors sing and play instruments, double roles, and keep the productions swift and joyful, staying true to the belief that Shakespeare wrote crowd-pleasing entertainment, not solemn literature.

The playhouse sits in one of Virginia's most charming small cities. Staunton escaped the destruction that leveled many valley towns in the Civil War, and its downtown survives as a rich collection of Victorian architecture, much of it designed by a single prolific local architect. The walkable streets are full of shops, cafes, and inns, making it easy to spend a whole day around the theater.

The town is also the birthplace of President Woodrow Wilson, whose boyhood home and a presidential library sit nearby, and it neighbors the Frontier Culture Museum, an outdoor museum of immigrant farm life. Set in the wider Shenandoah Valley beneath the Blue Ridge, Staunton makes the Blackfriars the centerpiece of a rewarding cultural and scenic getaway.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.