Burning Coal Theatre, 224 Polk Street in Raleigh, is hosting three free performances of the play “Cain”, published by Lord Byron in 1821. The performances will be Thursday, March 17th, Friday, March 18th, and Sunday, March 20th, at 8 p.m. (Doors at 7:15 p.m.) Seating is general admission. Reserve seats online now.
Lord Byron’s Cain is a darkly lyrical, dramatic rumination on love, fate and evil, in which one character’s encounter with the Devil leads to dire consequences of Biblical proportions.
Published in 1821, originally as closet drama, Cain’s twentieth-century stage history included a dramatization by Stanislavski and unfulfilled plans for an operatic adaptation from James Joyce. Today the play hides somewhat in the shadows of Byron’s corpus, behind the likes of Manfred, Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
This production of Cain, directed and produced by Michael Seebold for the MA in English capstone at North Carolina State University, aims to resurrect the vitality and enigma of Byron’s script for performance on the contemporary stage.