|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Welcome to 35below, ACT's intimate black box performance space. 35below offers the same quality performance you've come to expect on the Mainstage, just a bit edgier. Located in the back of the theatre, 35below offers an small setting for outstanding dramas and comedies -- from the Tony Award winning I Am My Own Wife to the uproariously funny Miss Gulch Return -- and everything in between, including special events from ACT's senior acting troupe, The Autumn Players. Join us for a great show.
|
|
Elisabeth Gray of New Umbrella, Inc. |
Southern (dis)Comfort and Wish I had a Sylvia Plath Featuring New York-based equity actress Elisabeth Gray. Co-presented by ACT and New Umbrella, Inc.
Southern (dis)Comfort June 10-26, Thursdays - Saturdays, 7:30pm Directed by Ralph Redpath; featuring Elisabeth Gray Tickets: $15. 828-254-1320
Directed by local legend Ralph Redpath, Southern (dis)Comfort is a series of monologues that focus on Southern trial and tribulation. The featured monologue is “Crooked,” the story of a South Carolina woman in a plastic surgeon’s office talking about the asymmetry of her face. The piece, which won the national monologue competition One-on-One, explores Southern femininity and the preoccupation with perfection. Actress Elisabeth Gray on Southern (dis)Comfort: "Southern (dis)Comfort is an exploration of our loneliness and the drastic measures we take to overcome it. Tennessee Williams once called it “the loneliness that follows me around like a shadow or disease”, and while Southerners seem to be particularly afflicted, I am certain we have all known that isolation which the Southern writer Walker Percy identified as “the modern malaise…you in the world and you no more belonging to the world than Banquo’s ghost.”
The characters presented in the show are all based on real, live Southerners I have met and known in my years growing up in the South, and they use all sorts of tactics to engage or escape their loneliness. Some destroy themselves, some destroy others, some seduce, some repel…some just avoid anything that matters. In any case, talking- whether to themselves, a crowd or an imaginary friend- seems to alleviate and illuminate all at once.
Southerners remain some of the most stereotyped, oversimplified and misunderstood people in the world. All the characters you meet in the show (and the writer who created them) were born and raised in the American South; they are all complex individuals with rich interior lives, vibrant thoughts and ready sensitivities. What emerges from within them is a profound embodiment of the paradox of life: the good and the bad, the divine and the obscene, the comic and the tragic. As Flannery O’Connor concluded: “For me, anything that is comic is truly tragic and anything that is tragic is truly comic.”
Wish I had a Sylvia Plath July 1-17, Thursdays - Saturdays, 7:30pm This award-winning production is a multimedia tragicomedy which tackles the topic of suicide with talking ovens, cooking shows, and poetry. Created and first performed in Asheville, this Fringe First winning show will open Off-Broadway in the Fall. Tickets: $15. 828-254-1320
|
|
NC Premiere! By Waylon Wood; directed by Jack Lindsay April 1-24, 2010. Performances Thursdays - Saturdays: 7:30pm When the power goes out after a July storm in a small town in the Florida panhandle, Wanna June Duke is determined to enjoy a languid evening under the stars by the light of the full moon. But her son Roy Boy picks up (literally) their persnickety neighbor Miss Bailey and deposits her in a lawn chair in the yard; her eldest daughter Dot arrives after leaving her husband; and her younger daughter Jewel, fresh from a rendezvous at the river, has secrets to spill. Like the river for which it is named, this play meanders, revealing a family’s history and the skeletons in their closets that could finally tear them apart. Written by local playwright and actor Waylon Wood. TICKETS: $15. $10 for students. Recommended for mature audiences. "Talk back" session with playwright Waylon Wood following Friday, April 2 show. Watch an interview with playwright Waylon Wood.
|
