"Rich with provocative ideas... a youthful vitality and daring freshness that's refreshing and imaginative.  The performances are delightfully organic and passionate.  Offers by the bushel the very energy and ingenuity lacking in [the Ahmanson's] 'Romeo and Juliet.'"  -Paul Birchall, Back Stage West

"Wildly imaginative... [a] serious commitment to classical literature combined with skillful use of fresh, unconventional staging and technology."  -Philip Brandes, Los Angeles Times

"Cleverly directed... with beautiful staging and imagery, well-spoken verse and talented actors.  The company deserves high marks for skill and courage."  -Neal Weaver, L.A. Weekly

"The Lone Star Ensemble is a new amalgam of attractive young friends who met in college and have reconnected in a common goal: to make it in The Industry and still create some damn good live theater while they do it.  And if Lone Star's multimedia-infused adaptation of Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis' is any indication, these folks know what they're doing."  -Travis Michael Holder, Entertainment Today

While today considered among Shakespeare's more obscure writings, evidence shows that Venus and Adonis -- ironically -- was the Bard's most celebrated piece during his lifetime.  One of his few works written in narrative format (theatrical plays having been temporarily banned due to an outbreak of bubonic plague), performances of this remarkable poem -- officially billed as "staged readings" -- were quite popular in Elizabethan England.

Based on Greco-Roman mythology, Venus tells the story of the goddess of sex and her infatuation with a young man -- Adonis -- who shuns human intimacy in his obsession with hunting.  His ultimate goal: the pursuit of an elusive wild boar -- itself the archetypal symbol of man's struggle with his own inner demons.

The task of updating Venus for the 21st century (while preserving Shakespeare's original text) has proven highly rewarding.  In our modern age of cyber-addiction, extreme video games, Internet chat rooms, and personal alienation, Venus and Adonis takes on an eerie new significance... an intrinsic applicability to today's society.  The result -- a multimedia fusion of sound, video, virtual reality, and live theatre -- is structured to introduce contemporary audiences to this singularly fascinating piece of classical literature.

VENUS AND ADONIS IMAGE AND VIDEO GALLERIES

"For the hunting peoples of those remotest human millenniums, the presences of the animal kingdom were the primary manifestations of what was alien -- the source at once of danger, and of sustenance.  [Then] the great field of instructive wonder shifted -- to the skies -- and mankind enacted the great pantomime of the hieratic, planetary state, and the symbolic festivals of the world-regulating spheres. 

"Today all of these mysteries have lost their force; their symbols no longer interest our psyche.  The notion of a cosmic law, which all existence serves and to which man himself must bend, has long since passed through the preliminary mystical stages represented in the old astrology.  The invention of the power-driven machine and the development of the scientific method of research have so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed. 

"In the fateful, epoch-announcing words of Nietzsche's Zarathustra: 'Dead are all the gods.'  One does not know toward what one moves.  One does not know by what one is propelled.  Every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality, and art is in full decay.  The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two. 

"Not the animal world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery." -Joseph Campbell