MEDIA RELEASE August
15, 2012
Exciting, Insightful Stories of a
Polarized Culture
Connecticut Repertory Theatre Season Explores a Disparate Society
Through Diverse Theatrical Productions
Storrs: The Connecticut
Repertory Theatre (CRT) announces its 2012 – 2013 season which will include a
wide variety of exciting theatrical styles investigating a polarized society. For detailed information and tickets call the box office at
860-486-2113
or visit www.crt.uconn.edu.
Artistic Director Vincent J.
Cardinal said, “In the new play O Beautiful by Theresa Rebeck, Benjamin
Franklin appears on a Glenn Beck style “television news” show and states, “I am
advocating temperate debate, and common sense.” To which the TV host fires
back, “These are not temperate or sensible times!” Our current
Presidential election campaign and the political discourse on both sides of the
debate proves the TV host’s observation. Each of the plays this season
examines personal stories at moments in our history when the national
conversation favored division and the human heart sought compassion.”
THE MAIN
STAGE SERIES
O Beautiful October 4 - October 14, 2012
By Theresa Rebeck, Regional Premiere Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre
Directed by Joseph Hanreddy
O Beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves
. . . In our age of cyber-bullying and aggressive patriotism remember those
lyrics – or else! Theresa Rebeck, Broadway playwright and creator of the TV
series Smash, pens a theatrically inventive mash up of contemporary
American life and the history that got us to this politically polarized age.
Its fiercely funny story explores the lives of high school students, teachers,
and their families as they cope in a world of real personal problems and
extremist ideological rhetoric that gets so heated that Jesus, Saint Paul, Joan
of Arc, John Adams, Patrick Henry and Benjamin Franklin, among others, show up
to weigh in and mix it up. Alternately sweet and fiery, and as topical as
tonight’s newscast, O Beautiful lands the complex realities of our
culture squarely on the stage deck in an electrifying blend of ancient
characters, founding fathers and your neighborhood high school.
Warning: This show includes political,
social and religious content that some will find challenging, maybe even
offensive. Don’t miss it!
Romeo and Juliet November 29 - December 9, 2012
By William Shakespeare Nafe Katter Theatre
Directed by Vincent J.
This timeless tale of “star-cross’d lovers” fills the stage with
dizzying swordplay and delightful wordplay. From the first blush of forbidden
teenage love, to the blooming of a passion that fuels death itself,
Shakespeare’s classic love story thrills anew in every generation. In the heat
of a raging feud between their two households, teenagers Romeo and Juliet lose
their hearts to each other in a chance meeting. With a price on Romeo’s head,
and Juliet suddenly betrothed to another man, the young lovers share a night of
forbidden passion before Romeo flees the city. Juliet’s desperate pleas to call
off the wedding are denied, and she hatches a secret plan for them to be
reunited, with devastating consequences. Connecticut Repertory Theatre winds up
2012 with a play as passionate, comic and frightening as love itself.
His Girl Friday February
28 - March 10, 2013
Adapted by John Guare From The
Front Page Nafe Katter Theatre
By Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur & the Columbia Pictures
Film, Directed by Dale AJ Rose
His Girl Friday is an all American rat-a-tat
comedy adapted from the film to the stage by acclaimed playwright John Guare.
It’s August 1939 in the Press Room of the Criminal Courts Building in
Chicago. On the world stage Hitler is about to invade Poland, but tonight
Hildy Johnson just wants to bid farewell to her old pals, get married and leave
the newspaper racket behind, which should go well unless she runs into her
hard-boiled editor and ex-husband Walter Burns who wants to keep her on the
beat and in his life. With rapid-fire dialogue and a crackling conflict, His
Girl Friday remains one of our wildest, wittiest whirlwinds of American
romantic comedy.
Hairspray April
25 - May 5, 2013
Music by Marc Shaiman Harriet S. Jorgensen Theatre
Music & Lyrics by Marc Shaiman & Scott Whittman, Book by
Mark O’Donnell & Thomas Meehan
Directed by Paul Mullins, Choreographed by Gerry McIntyre, Musical
Direction by Ken Clark
Move over Baltimore! Storrs is the new home for Tracy Turnblad,
the big girl with the big hair and the even bigger passion – to dance! It’s
1962 and Tracy wins a spot on the local TV dance program, “The Corny Collins
Show.” Overnight Tracy is transformed from outsider to irrepressible teen
celebrity. But can an unconventional trendsetter in dance, music and fashion
vanquish the program’s reigning princess, win the heart of heartthrob Link
Larkin, and integrate a television show without denting her ‘do? Hairspray,
winner of eight Tony Awards including Best Musical, is a family-friendly
musical piled bouffant high with laughter, romance, and deliriously tuneful
songs.
THE
STUDIO WORKS SERIES
Intimate Apparel October
25 - November 4, 2012
By Lynne Nottage Studio
Theatre
Directed by Michael Bradford
At 35, Esther is lonely. A skilled African-American seamstress in
1905 Manhattan, she makes exquisite undergarments for clients including a
sincere socialite from tony Fifth Avenue and an earnest prostitute.
Strong, practical and confident Esther resists her landlady’s insistence on
marriage for marriage’s sake while cautiously allowing an unexpected
friendship, filled with longing, to grow between her and her fabric merchant,
an immigrant Jew. After exchanging letters with a West Indian laborer,
Esther finally accepts his invitation and marries this man she has never met.
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage stitches a tale of romance,
greed and ambition – and also a tender story of seeking real friendship across
the vast social gulf separating a seamstress and a socialite, the yearning of
inter-racial as well as inter-faith love, and the persistence of spirit as
Esther tries to craft a life as beautiful as one of her camisoles. “Ms.
Nottage writes big-hearted plays,” – New York Times
Punk Rock March
28 - April 7, 2013
By Simon Stephens Studio
Theatre
Directed by Kristin Wold
Variety calls Simon Stephens “one of the
most important and exciting British playwrights working today…” His play
Punk Rock, set at a British boarding school, is inspired by the 1999
Columbine shooting, which Stephens says, “felt like the start of the 21st
century.” Ferociously funny, complex, contemporary and unnerving, Punk Rock
explores the underlying jittery tensions, hormonal headiness and potential
violence in a group of affluent, articulate seventeen-year-old students as they
begin to plan for college and the rest of their lives. What happens when
kids have the world at their feet, and its weight on their shoulders?
O Beautiful is a plea for civil discourse and
empathy by one of our most important contemporary writers. Set in an average
American suburb, the play asks, through sharp humor and electrifying theatrical
invention, what happens to our teenagers as they try to find their way in a
world defined by polarizing rhetoric and vitriol? O Beautiful is
controversial, challenging, and human. In the end, Rebeck finds our common
values through our best hopes and aspirations. Veteran playwright and director
Joseph Hanreddy will helm this regional premiere. CRT audiences loved
Hanreddy’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 2011.
In
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a long divide between the Montague and
Capulet families causes tragic results. Over the centuries this feud has been
re-imagined by each generation to reflect the racial, cultural, familial and
ethnic separations, propagated by the elders that define the times. This
masterpiece has much to contribute to CRT’s season-long conversation about
finding genuine connection in a polarized world.
Romantic
polarization is the engine of screwball comedy and playwright John Guare brings
one of the great comic films to the stage with his new adaption of Howard Hawks’
His Girl Friday. Guare’s adaption sets this comic war of wills against the
backdrop of a United States about to go to war, which adds gravitas to the
prickliest, and funniest, romance since Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict.
CRT will
close the Main Stage Series full of nostalgia and hope, with the deliriously
tuneful dance musical Hairspray, which takes on racial segregation,
bullying, and social prejudice without missing a step or hitting a sour note.
Paul Mullins, director of last season’s hit premiere I’m Connecticut,
will helm this irresistible Broadway musical. As The New York Times said, “If
life were everything it should be, it would be more like Hairspray.”
In the Studio
Works Series, a series of student productions in the intimate 116-seat Studio
Theatre, CRT will present Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynne Nottage’s Intimate
Apparel about a modest African American seamstress who fashions delicate
undergarments for women across social strata in the New York City of 1905. Intimate
Apparel explores the common thread of love and aspiration across racial,
social, and cultural divides. The spring Studio Works show will be Simon
Stephens’ Punk Rock. Punk Rock makes a nod to familiar territory
covered in the much-appreciated History Boys, Catcher in the Rye,
even TV’s Skins, but Stephens manages to capture something uniquely of
this moment in time. These current teens, vicious with laughter and frustrated
in everyday hope, internalize the pressures they are forced to endure and the
result is shocking, devoid of nostalgia, and resonant with warning.
Near the end
of O Beautiful at a particularly heated town meeting, Jesus, a member of
the community, quiets the chaos with a loud whistle and a prayer. He says,
Please let us remember we are a community of beings who share
this earth with each other.
Let us listen to each other with grace and humility. Amen.
SPECIAL
PUPPET ARTS PRODUCTION
The Dick Myers Puppet Theatre
Project April 11 – 14, 2013
Studio
Theatre
In the 1960’s and 70’s Dick Myers
toured his one-man puppet performances based on classic fairy tales throughout
Europe, The Soviet Union, Japan and the U.S. Jim Henson and Frank Oz both
proclaimed Dick Myers as "the genius of American Puppetry." MFA
Puppet Arts student, Seth Shaffer will restore the original puppets and remount
two of Dick Myers' shows under the direction of Bart Roccoberton, Head of the
renowned UConn Puppet Arts program. Tickets for this special presentation
will be available exclusively to CRT subscribers through Oct. 31 by
calling 860-486-2113. General audience tickets will go on sale Nov. 1.
Ticket prices are $15 for general audiences, and $12 for CRT subscribers.
Seating will be limited, so call quickly!
SUBSCRIPTION
INFORMATION
Current CRT subscribers have been sent a subscription renewal
form. New subscriptions are on sale now. Please call 860-486-2113 for information
on subscribing and general ticket information. The CRT Box Office is now
located at the Nafe Katter Theatre, 820 Bolton Road, on the Storrs campus. The Box Office is open Monday through Friday
from noon to 5 p.m.
Performances are usually Wednesdays through Sundays. Wed. & Thu. evening performances start at
7:30 p.m., Fri. and Sat. evening performances start at 8 p.m., Sat. and Sun.
matinee performances start at 2 p.m.
There are occasional Tues. evening performances at 7:30 p.m.
Ticket prices range from $6 to $36, and subscribers receive a discount of up to 25 percent off regular ticket
prices.
All
plays, dates and times are subject to change.
Connecticut
Repertory Theatre
CRT is the professional producing arm of the Department of
Dramatic Arts at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. CRT productions are
directed, designed by and cast with visiting professional artists, including
Equity actors, faculty members, and the department’s most advanced student
artists. The synergy between
professional and advanced student artists creates extraordinary theatre and a
unique learning environment.
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