Theatre for a New Audience has truly found a new audience: The Off Broadway-based company will take the world premiere of Bartlett Sher's Cymbeline to the UK's Royal Shakespeare Company Nov. 22 in their first trip outside of the United States.

TFANA also has the honor of offering the first American production of William Shakespeare performed on the RSC's stages. Cymbeline, which will be cast with American actors and rehearse in New York prior to arrival in London, will play the Other Place studio space in Shakespeare's birthplace, Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Theatre for a New Audience and the Royal Shakespeare Company have recently entered a sort of international exchange program. Sher attended the RSC's American Directors Project, where the company's voice director Cicely Berry gave instruction on developing directors' skills in the areas of text, language and voice. The New York company also welcomed the Royal Shakespeare Company's founder Sir Peter Hall (Tantalus, Amadeus) to their home base Off-Broadway to direct Shakepeare's Troilus and Cressida.

Sher recently staged Cymbeline at Seattle's Intiman Theatre, where he is artistic director, March 9-April 7. The cast featured Julyana Soelistyo, a Tony nominee for Golden Child, as Imogen. For TFNA, Sher helmed the hit U.S. premiere of Harley Granville Barker's 1907 drama Waste.

— By Christine Ehren