With this thought in mind, British playwright Sir Alan Ayckbourn created the “Absurd Person Singular.” The show is presented in the Denver Center Theatre Company , at the Space Theatre.

According to the Denver Post, Ayckbourn, who has been called the world’s most produced playwright behind Shakespeare, once told The Denver Post that theater has gotten too stern an image. “It’s the job of theater to make you laugh and disturb you,” he said. “Ideally, a play should do both.”

The play is set over three Christmas celebrations in the kitchens of three couples: Sidney Hopcroft, an ambitious merchant and his meek wife Jane; architect and adulterer Geoffrey Turner and his depressed wife Eva; and Ronald Brewster-Wright, a banker and his snob of a wife Marion.

In this dark British farce, Ayckbourn hopes that “any couple will see something of themselves in one or more of those three couples.”

The show goes on until December 19. Buy tickets

Set in rural Maine in the summer of 2004, Summer People, a new play by Gift ensemble member Connell, toggles uneasily among a number of interconnected story lines. While Summer People combines foreign policy and domestic drama to less than satisfying effect, the Gift’s production is well acted scene to scene. (Read more: http://bit.ly/306tiV)

The play goes through December 13. Get tickets.

According to the Guthrie Theater review, the three-character drama is a set of monologues by the actors, as they each give their version of the stillbirth of Grace’s baby. In this intimate portrait of three adults, told through a series of four emotionally stirring monologues, Frank, Grace and Teddy each describe their own version of the personal and professional bond they share, the astonishing yet unpredictable nature of Frank’s ability, and how their lives were ultimately shaped forever by a single event.

The play will go on until December 6, 2009. Get tickets.

via Promoting Theater in a World without Print.

The original play  ran on Broadway 328 times and was given a Tony Award in 1947.

Octagon Theatre’s production is directed by David Thacker, who has directed many of Miller’s plays and had a close working relationship with him.

According to Glenn Meads, All My Sons still remains an unbearably moving and powerful American family drama set in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Octagon’s version, however, brings to a climax the Octagon’s exploration of Arthur Miller’s greatest plays, following A View From the Bridge, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. Miller’s first major play tells the story about truth and denial, integrity and corruption, and personal responsibility during the chaos of war.

The play starts October 1 and goes on until October 24.

Get your tickets here!

Peter Shaffer, the director of the play, took the idea from Anton Chekhov’s The Marriage Proposal to create a contemporary version of a never-outdated story. “Enlightening  farce,” as called by the Arts Club itself, the play is fast-paced and fun. This play truly is a comedy of situations. It holds the audience entertained and intrigued up to the last minute when the true character of everyone is revealed.

It’s interesting that black in the name doesn’t refer to a satirical commentary on controvercial subject matter, as some may think. In this case, it refers to the setting in which the action is taking place – the absence of light prevails throughout most of the performance (source).

Overall, this is a great play to start the theatre season off. If you are ever in Vancouver, you should check it out. The play goes on until October 11, 2009.

September 5, STC celebrated the launching of a new performance starring Cate Blanchett and Tim Richards. A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennessee Williams in 1945, was once called a “tragedy of misunderstandings and insensitivity” by the playwright himself.

According to the film and stage director Bruce Beresford, A Streetcar Named Desire is “very, very powerful writing about human desire and that’s what makes it so timeless. Those kinds of universal passions are not going to fizzle out in a hurry.”

As to the new staging of the play, John McCallum from The Australian says that “Liv Ullmann’s production – traditional, straightforward, lovingly loyal to the text and done with the kind of emotional, heightened realism that Williams sought in all his stage writing – reminds us how shocking this great play was and still is. It is rivetingly involving.”

Considering the fact that currently all the tickets to the performance are sold out, the conclusion can be made that A Streetcar Named Desire started off successfully. The performance goes on until October 17.

Click here for more information on the play and how to get the tickets.

The festival featured troupes from France, Australia, Japan and many other countries. Each one of the participants brought something exceptional to the program. Every performance was great, but there are a few that  grabbed my attention and that I would like to mention here.

1. “Lipsynch” Theatre EX MACHINA (Quebec, Canada), Theatre sans Frontieres (Newcastle, United Kingdom)

This play tells a story, or rather, it tells 9 stories about the interweaving fates of 9 different people. The blend of languages and cultures that lasts 9 hours brings forth the main point of the play – in this forgotten world these people can survive only through the self-sacrifice of others.

“Robert Lepage staged Lipsynch as a saga about time and the God-forsaken mankind. About the people who are desperately clinging to what is utterly transient: the voice, the sound, the memory… Time and again the characters ponder over the meaning of existence, but, like most of us in real life, they are essentially inconsistent: Lepage is not only delicate and indulgent; any form of affectation is for all intents and purposes alien to him. And therefore he can afford a striking and dramatically risky final scene, performed to the divine voice of the son’s foster mother, when he lifts and takes into his arms the body of his real mother whom he has never seen. It is a kind of Pieta turned inside out and this magnificent and prolonged Lipsynch culminates in the moment when the small female wrist drops – the gesture both powerless and full of power.” Roman Dolzhanskiy, Kommersant

2. “Dorian Gray” A New Adventures Production. London, GB

“Matthew Bourne’s version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray has generated some wildly varying responses since its official premiere in Edinburgh. Bourne can be far more explicit in revealing the emotional alienation and moral drift that are endemic to Dorian’s world of narcissism and self-gratification. In combination with Lez Brotherston’s genius design (the voodoo mix of Bacon, Hirst and Chapman Brothers imagery in the second half accumulates a real Heart of Darkness horror), Bourne presents a world where the quest for sensation represents both a holy grail and an impossibility, as Dorian’s drug- and sex-numbed body loses the ability to feel.” Judith Mackrell guardian.co.uk

3.“The Navigator” An opera by Liza Lim and Patricia Sykes

“The Navigator is a part-opera, part-theatre, part-contemporary music performance that draws inspiration from the Indian epic the Mahabharata and the legend of Tristan and Isolde. The result is a provocative and visually delicious work which feels more like an erotically charged fashion show in a dollhouse than an opera.

With five singers and 16 instrumentalists driving the performance, it plunges from moments of sublime beauty and clarity to the dark, disturbed and the erotic. Kosky has filled this work with bold, experimental choices that are likely to divide audiences, bringing the intensity and power of opera together with the power of the visual aesthetic.” Laura Hillis – Arts Hub

the information was taken from www.chekhovfest.ru

The love for theatre runs in my blood – the families of my parents were experienced theatre goers and appreciated the performing arts. They passed along the passion for the theatre to me. I have already seen more than 50 great performances, including Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), The Threepenny Opera (Brecht), The Pickwick Club (Dickens), Eurydice (Ruhl), Small Craft Warnings (Williams), Confessions of Felix Krull (Mann), 42nd Street, Rent, and Phantom of the Opera.

I am studying PR and Advertising in college, and after graduation I want to pursue my career in Theatre Public Relations.

I have a great appreciation for a theatre as an art. It is very real. Every time when a play starts, the actors – real people – come out on stage and tell their story. And every time when the cast changes the story is told differently. In theatre there is no place for countless takes that bring other arts like cinematography to perfection. Here actors are given only one chance to do it right and to express emotions that would relate them to their spectators. This art is not perfect, but its beauty is in its imperfection. It brings all of your attention to the stage and shows you the reality of the world.

In this blog I want to open the curtain into the theatre world  by posting  updates of the new plays, musicals and anything else that will be going on in the performing arts venues. Hopefully this blog will help the theatre lovers keep up with the theatre world and discover the new exciting performances and events.