This year's Summer Theater Festival at Live Arts includes two one-act plays by Eugene Ionesco, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson.
Visit the Live Arts website for descriptions of plays for this year's festival. There is a link on that page to view a schedule of performance times.
| brief director's notes |
Questioning and distorting the medium came first to art and music, but inevitably to theater as well. Ionesco the playwright began as a theater iconoclast. Fifty years later, the iconoclast is recast as an innovator. Ionesco's humor of patterned speech echos on in Monty Python. His strange and estranged worlds seem as cousins to visions from David Lynch. The strangeness is still there, and certainly the humor. But it is a familiar strangeness. Each play has its own internal delight to enjoy, yet also is a mirror for seeing our world in a new cast. What you see is Theater itself as part of our world. Critical is your own response, which cannot be but your own responsibility. Ionesco subtitled The Bald Soprano "an anti-play" and The Lesson "a comic drama". Apart and beyond his thematic intent, these -- Ionesco's first two plays -- are perhaps his funniest. Art Collier's dramaturge notes, written for the cast, contain a few "plot spoilers". Here they are, to read after seeing the plays! |
| Bill Niebel |
| dramaturge notes to The Bald Soprano | dramaturge notes to The Lesson |
| cast for The Bald Soprano | |
| Mrs. Smith: | Karen Wolcott |
| Mr. Smith: | Harold Langsam |
| Mary: | Jennifer Sohn |
| Mr. Martin: | Doug Chapman |
| Mrs. Martin: | Karen VanHelden |
| The Fire Chief: | David Holton |
| cast for The Lesson | |
| Marie: | Karen Wolcott |
| Pupil: | Karen VanHelden |
| Professor: | David Holton |
| production crew for both plays | |
| Art Collier, | dramaturge |
| Pat Crowley, | assistant stage manager |
| Bill Niebel, | director |
| Nathan Piazza, | sound |
| Lesley Pleasant, | costumes |
| David Reynaud, | design |
| Frida Theros, | stage manager |