Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
2010/2011 Season
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May 10, 2010
Albee’s Three Tall Women Completes the Season
Two months ago we released our 2010/11 Season short one show, which we promised to announce at a later date. At this time, I’m pleased that we can finally announce Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women as the play that will complete our season. This will be the second play by Albee that I’ve directed at Court Theatre, following our 2004 production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. I spent a great deal of time with my copy of Three Tall Women this winter, wrestling with my own conflicted opinion of the play and its view of life and death. The play follows three women, named only A, B, and C—one woman in youth, one woman in middle age, and one woman on her death bed. As the elder woman reflects on her life—including the estrangement of her son, widely interpreted to represent Albee himself—she develops clarity of mind that transcends her debilitated body. Albee wrote the play shortly after the passing of his adoptive mother, with whom he had a fraught relationship; he has often described the writing process of Three Tall Women as an “exorcism.” It is a wickedly funny play, but persistently difficult, and the residual venom between Albee and his mother is very foreign to my own personal experience. Nevertheless, I admire the kinetic energy and the scope of the text, and it provides an extraordinary challenge to me and three actresses—exactly the kind of challenges I like to seek out. Famously, this was the play that made people take a second look at Edward Albee, and I think it’s actually the right classic play to fill the final slot of the 2010/11 Season. I hope to announce the three talented actresses who will fill the parts soon—check this blog again for more news!
In the meantime, be sure to learn about the rest of the plays in our 2010/11 Season: The Comedy of Errors, Home, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Porgy and Bess!
Kevin Gudahl and Barbara E. Robertson in Court’s 2004 production of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? directed by Charles Newell.
March 8, 2010
Announcing Court’s 56th Season of Classic Plays
Friends and loyal readers of Open Rehearsal, I’m pleased to announce Court Theatre’s fifty-sixth season of classic plays for 2010-11. I couldn’t be prouder of this new slate of plays, which promises to continue taking Court to the next level as a center for classic theatre. Allow me to take you on a short tour of the season.
William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors
Directed by Sean Graney
September 16, 2010 - October 17, 2010
Sean Graney has directed two classic farces at Court Theatre, 2007’s What the Butler Saw and 2009’s The Mystery of Irma Vep. In both productions, I saw Sean challenge himself and push his craft to find a solution for each new problem that these deceptively difficult plays posed for him. Now, as a next step in Sean’s exploration of comedy, as well as his playful inquiry into themes of identity and disguise, he’ll be taking on William Shakespeare’s classic farce about two sets of twins separated at birth, The Comedy of Errors. As a formal challenge to himself, Sean intends to perform the play with only six actors, requiring each actor to play three different characters—often at the same time!
Home by Samm-Art Williams
Directed by Ron OJ Parson, Resident Artist
November 11, 2010 - December 12, 2010
Our resident artist Ron OJ Parson (directing Sizwe Banzi is Dead this spring at Court Theatre) returns to direct a modern classic, Home. First produced by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1981, Home tells the story of Cephus Miles and his life’s journey out and back from his small town in North Carolina. Spanning the tumultuous decades of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Williams’s play is an intimate, enduring story told with charm and poetry. Based in part on his early life in North Carolina, and inspired by his longing for home while living in New York, Williams envisioned the play’s form as something simple, something that could be performed in the street “if push comes to shove.” Ron OJ Parson directed Home at Signature Theatre Company to critical and popular acclaim in New York in 2008, for which he won New York’s Audelco Award.
Play Three
Directed by Charles Newell
January 13 - February 13, 2011
I can’t tell you any details just yet, but we’re finalizing the plans for me to direct a classic play in our third slot of the season. I’m very excited about what this is going to be. Check this blog in the next few weeks for updates!
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Adapted by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Jessica Thebus
March 10, 2011 - April 10, 2011
For some time now I’ve been fascinated by Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel Orlando, the story of an English nobleman who falls asleep and wakes up as a woman. An “imaginative biography” of Woolf’s intimate friend Vita Sackville-West that takes place over four centuries and different continents, Orlando seemed to me impossible to adapt to the stage until I discovered acclaimed American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s treatment of it. Her adaptation captures Woolf’s biting whimsy while rendering the story of Orlando energetically theatrical. I’m overjoyed that we’ve been able to invite Jessica Thebus to direct for the very first time at Court Theatre. Jessica has directed a number of Ruhl’s plays (Dead Man’s Cell Phone, The Clean House), and I can’t wait to see her staging of Orlando.
The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
By George Gershwin, DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin
Directed by Charles Newell
Music Direction by Doug Peck
Artistic Consultant Ron OJ Parson
May 12, 2011 - June 19, 2011
Considered to be George Gershwin’s magnum opus, Porgy and Bess is a “folk opera” with a score that features unforgettable songs like “Summertime,” later recorded time and again by pop, blues, and jazz musicians. Similar to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess was meant to combine the “high” and “low” idioms of classical opera and contemporary jazz and blues, this time to tell DuBose Heyward’s story of Porgy, a disabled man living in a slum of Charleston, South Carolina who falls in love with an itinerant woman named Bess. In 1935, the opera premiered on Broadway with an all-African-American cast, still rare at the time. Since then, it has risen in status as a legitimate American opera while diminishing as a legitimate piece of African-American theater, in large part due to charges of insensitivity in its romanticizing portrayal of poor African-Americans. In collaboration with Doug Peck (Caroline, or Change) and resident artist Ron OJ Parson, we will address the checkered past of Porgy and Bess and return to the original intentions of the authors to create a “true serious picture” of the inhabitants of Catfish Row. A longstanding Everest in my mind, the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess is a new and exhilarating challenge for me as a director.
It’s time now for me to disappear back into technical rehearsals for The Illusion (opening March 11), but I hope you’ll join me for all five of next season’s plays by becoming a subscriber to Court Theatre. It’s the best and cheapest way to get the most out of what Court has to offer. Until then, see you at the theater!
