Wholly Unique Creations
April 16, 2026
I moved to Cincinnati in August, 2010. Around a month into my time in the city, I found myself with an open weekend and googled to see what entertainments I could find, especially live theatre. I was then (as I still am today) baffled and delighted by the embarrassment of riches that is the Cincinnati art scene. But what caught my attention most was a production of one of my favorite Shakespeare comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. Thus began a sixteen-year-long devotion to Cincy Shakes. In 2013, I joined the associate board (a YP development effort), and in 2020, I was inducted as a full board member.If you’ve never been, let me tell you: you’re missing out. Cincy Shakes moved to its current, purpose-built theatrical home on the corner of 12th and Elm in August, 2017. In the gorgeous Otto M. Budig Theatre, the production quality has skyrocketed to match the incredible talent of this resident ensemble company. Shakespeare isn’t your thing? Well, it only makes up half the schedule each year—the rest is filled with other classics of theatre, new and old. For example, this season closes with a new stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, and next season includes Lee Hall’s stage play based on Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network.
But of course, my favorite is always the Shakespeare on offer. About ten years ago, I began bringing a group of Xavier students to a play each semester. In the fall, we saw the riotous Love’s Labour’s Lost, and just last month, a group of twenty faculty and students headed to OTR to see the stunning (and challenging) Othello. This production was staged in the round, and we were fortunate to be seated onstage, up close and personal with the actors for this gutting tragedy. While I find the play beautiful to read, it’s an extremely difficult one to watch, as it displays a white man gaslighting a Black man until he is driven to self-destruct. It’s a hard tale to sit through, but in the hands of talented actors and a thoughtful director, powerful in the extreme. The production at Cincy Shakes was extraordinary. It leveraged surprising humor to add even more bite to the insidious treachery of the play’s villain, Iago, while Sylvester Little, Jr., played Othello as a man abused past all endurance, retaining audience sympathy through even his most destructive moments.
I’ve always felt there’s a unique magic to the experience of live theatre. Performance studies tell us that it’s ephemeral, never to be recreated, wholly unique in each incarnation. For me, gathering not only to witness immense talent, but also to collectively feel something—joy, horror, grief, fury, delight—resists any attempt to minimize or brush aside what is so essentially human. This is not an experience that AI can recreate or supplant. It’s not the same as sitting at home in front of a screen, which offers distance and the opportunity to disconnect at any moment. It demands attention and rewards emotional investment with catharsis and community.
In the case of Cincy Shakes, a resident ensemble theatre, that experience only gains depth and richness over time as you return for new productions and recognize familiar faces in different roles. They may be the same people you run into at Kroger or in the local dog park. They may even be a former Xavier undergraduate (hello, Patrick Phillips, Xavier ’14 and rising star of the local theatre!). To put it in Jesuit terms, attending theatrical performance in your local community is a beautiful incarnation of cura personalis, one that demands bodily copresence and mental investment and yields collective experience that enriches our connections to our emotions, each other, the arts, and our city.
Dr. Niamh O'Leary
Chair and Professor of English