2023 Shows
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Director - David Tune
Assist. Director - Mel Winkler
Educating Rita - July 2023
Educating Rita is a dramatic comedy play written by Willy Russell surrounding a twenty six year old working class woman Rita White, on a quest to achieve education, respect and a sense of “what it’s like to be free”, her dream is aided by her sarcastic, cynical middle class English tutor Frank. The play deals with everyday issues and this undoubtedly is where the charm of Educating Rita lays. Class, change, and education are the main themes of the play but darker undercurrents of Love and even suicide are somewhat present. The play’s genius is the interaction between Frank and Rita; the teacher and student.
1983 film version
Director - Dee Tune
Arsenic & Old Lace - October 2023
Director - Rex Madigan
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Joseph Kesselring's farcical black comedy ARSENIC AND OLD LACE.
This play is a farcical black comedy revolving around the Brewster family, descended from the Mayflower settlers but now composed of maniacs, most of them homicidal. The hero, Mortimer Brewster, is a drama critic who must deal with his crazy, murderous family and local police in Brooklyn, New York, as he debates whether to go through with his recent promise to marry the woman he loves, Elaine Harper, who lives next door and is the daughter of the local minister.
His family includes two spinster aunts, Abby and Martha Brewster, who have taken to murdering lonely old men by poisoning them with a glass of home-made elderberry wine laced with arsenic, strychnine, and "just a pinch" of cyanide; a brother, Teddy, who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt and digs locks for the Panama Canal in the cellar of the Brewster home (which then serve as graves for the aunts' victims; he thinks that they died of yellow fever); and a murderous brother, Jonathan, who has received plastic surgery performed by an alcoholic accomplice, Dr. Einstein (a character based on real-life gangland surgeon Joseph Moran) to conceal his identity, and now looks like horror-film actor Boris Karloff (a self-referential joke, as the part was originally played on Broadway by Karloff).
Throughout the play, Jonathan is plotting to kill his brother, in fact almost does in one scene. Mortimer is struggling to find solutions to rid his family of the crazy, eventually sending Teddy and his Aunts to a senior living home and letting Officer O'Hara deal with his brother.