Every year the Bard casts a long shadow across the Monterey Peninsula. It’s a landscape he (or whoever wrote his plays) may have been familiar with. It’s believed that England’s greatest privateer, Sir Francis Drake, sailed past the Monterey Peninsula in 1579 while futilely searching for an alternate northern route back to England. When he finally returned to England his ship’s log and charts were confiscated and classified by Queen Elizabeth.

PacRep’s Stephen Moorer revels in the possibility that someone else wrote William Shakespeare’s plays. If Moorer is right and the Bard’s 38 plays were the work of a highborn noble or even a committee of nobles, as PacRep’s production of The Beard of Avon suggested last year, then chances are good that the author or authors had access to Drake’s journals.

So what’s the significance? None really—other than the fact that it’s pleasing to picture Shakespeare or Sir Francis Bacon or Edward De Vere dreaming of our coastline while reading Drake’s fresh vibrant descriptions from his epic and then-recent voyage. It’s just enough of a connection to imagine that we live within the original set of The Tempest or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, here where the great poetry of the Bard mingles with the fog of Carmel.

And thanks to Moorer and PacRep, we are blessed with top-rate productions to celebrate this tenuous connection with the Shakespeare’s works. This week PacRep’s annual Shakespeare Festival opens with Timon of Athens, a play so rarely produced it’s said it finds a stage only once in a generation.

“We’re doing the once-in-the-millennium production,” Moorer jokes.

But that’s not because it’s one of Shakespeare’s lesser works. In fact, Timon of Athens resonates with our community as much as any of the Bard’s plays. The play charts the downfall of Timon, a wealthy, powerful and generous man who lives way beyond his means.  When the bills come due and he discovers that he is broke, he turns to his so-called friends and quickly learns a harsh lesson in life.

“It’s all about money,” Moorer says. “The effects of money on people and friends. How people treat you when you have it and how they treat you when you don’t. A lot of money goes through people’s hands here in our area. Fortunes are won and lost and this play examines how society treats these people. It’s timeless.”

To highlight these correlations Director Kenneth Kelleher has chosen to set the play in the modern era. In addition, Moorer and Kelleher cut the play’s text down to less than two hours “so it really moves along” and staged it in the intimate Circle Theatre.