Oliver Welles

Oliver Welles runs the New Burbage Shakespeare Festival, a company he built and now can barely hold together. He is brilliant, boozy, and impossible—full of grand pronouncements about art and contempt for compromise—and he is fixated on dragging his former student Geoffrey Tennant back into the fold to finish what he started.

Stephen Ouimette plays pomposity and genuine devotion to Shakespeare as the same impulse, so Oliver's grandest speeches land as both joke and creed. The performance never lets you settle on whether he's a fraud or a true believer, which is exactly the tension that makes him funny and, underneath that, quietly moving.