The inspiration for the 2024 Stratford Festival season, like so much in recent years, can be traced back to the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. But artistic director Antoni Cimolino wasn’t so much thinking about the virus itself when he began thinking about the Festival’s 2024 playbill as he was musing on our collective desire to discover “A World Elsewhere.” After months of lockdowns and gathering restrictions, there was, for many, a yearning to escape from our suddenly diminished environs.

“I was noticing people were so desperate to go on vacation again after the years of lockdown, but I also noticed people leaving jobs — you know, deciding ‘I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to do something else,” Cimolino said. “So this idea became, ‘what happens when we go somewhere else — when we unplug and become a new person?’” With theatre providing a similar sort of invitation — to enter and journey into new worlds — Cimolino looked for plays that would reinforce this sense of A World Elsewhere.

Some choices were obvious — Peter Pan’s Neverland, for example — while the worlds elsewhere in other plays were more indefinite or abstruse. Whatever the circumstance, however, the idea of a journey is central to each of this season’s dozen productions. Twelfth Night, this season’s opening-night production, is another where the World Elsewhere is obvious.

Directed by acclaimed actor Seana McKenna, this Shakespearean comedy invo.