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Mainstage Theatre Brochure
Click here to download the latest Mainstage Theatre season brochure in pdf format.Lost in Yonkers
by Neil Simon
Jamie Taylor, director
Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance
Rhode Island College Theatre Organization
When: October 1 - 4, 8:00 PM
October 4 & 5, 2:00 PM
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General Admission: $15 Winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Best Play: 1991 Tony Awards By America's great comic playwright, this memory play is set in a Yonkers in 1942 features another battling odd couple, this time an old woman and her 35 year old daughter. Bella, the daughter, is a retarded, affectionate and more than enough for Grandma Kurnitz to manage. As the play opens, son Eddie deposits his two young sons on the old lady's doorstep. He is in debt and needs to go on an extended sales trip to make some money. The boys must contend with Grandma, a stern, tough old lady; with Bella and her secret romance, and with Louie, her brother, who may have mob connections. Gradually, the mood deepens and darkens as the boys endure life with a family of emotionally crippled people. While the children are only temporarily exiled in Yonkers, the rest of their sad, funny family is truly lost. "The best play Simon ever wrote." N.Y. Post. "Broadway desperately needs a comedy, a drama, and a hit. With Lost in Yonkers, Mr. Simon has given us all three." Wall Street Journal. "One of Simon's most impressive and funniest plays." N.Y. Daily News. "Laughter and tears have come together in a new emotional truth. There are moments in this play when you experience a new kind of laughter for Simon, a silent laughter that doesn't explode into a "yuk" but implodes straight into your heart." Newsweek. |
Anna in the Tropics
by Nilo Cruz
Nehassaiu deGannes, director
Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance
Rhode Island College Theatre Organization
When: November 12 - 15, 8:00 PM
November 15 & 16, 2:00 PM
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General Admission: $15 Anna in the Tropics portrays the lives of cigar factory workers in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, when a new lector, perhaps the last to ply his trade, is hired. The men and women remain divided in their loyalties as economic hardship and the pressure to abandon old traditions force the owners of the cigar factory to adopt new, progressive manufacturing methods if they wish to stay in business. As the lector reads from Anna Karenina, a novel of adultery set in nineteenth-century Russia, he casts a spell over the workers, transforming their passions and desires through the affirming power of art. That the love they seek may result in a tragic end is ordained as much by the story of the Russian noblewoman as it is by the actions of the workers themselves. |
The Seagull
By Anton Chekhov
Directed by Naum Panovski
Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance
Rhode Island College Theatre Organization
When: February 18 - 22, 8:00 PM
February 21 & 22, 2:00 PM
| General Admission: $15 Anton Chekhov's Chayka or The Seagull (variously translated in English as The Sea Gull and The Sea-Gull) is the first play in the author's second period of writing for the theater-that of the last few years of his life-in which he penned his widely acknowledged dramatic masterpieces. With it, after a hiatus of seven years, Chekhov again returned to writing plays, and he revealed his mastery of techniques that he would exploit in his other great plays of that final period: Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. In all of them, Chekhov employs a method of "indirect action," one in which characters confront changes that result from offstage occurrences, often in a period of the characters' lives that elapses between acts. The plays also share the unique Chekhovian mood, a pervasive melancholic tone that arises from the haplessness of the characters that seem destined either to wallow in self-pity or indifference or consume themselves in frustrated passion. In The Seagull, a work that the author himself claimed contained "five tons of love," is a play about a very human tendency to reject love that is freely given and seek it where it is withheld. Many of its characters are caught in a destructive, triangular relationship that evokes both pathos and humor. What the characters cannot successfully parry is the destructive force of time, the passage of which robs some, like Madame Arkadina, of beauty, and others, like her son Konstantine, of hope. |
Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical
Book & Lyrics by Jerome Ragni and James Rado Music
by Galt Mcdermot
Directed by Bill Wilson
Book & Lyrics by Jerome Ragni and James Rado Music by Galt Mcdermot
Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance
Rhode Island College Theatre Organization
When: April 16 - 18, 8:00 PM
April 18 & 19, 2:00 PM
| General Admission: $15 When Hair moved to Broadway after 144 Off-Broadway performances at Joseph
Papp's Public Theatre, it played for 1,750 performances on Broadway at the
Biltmore Theatre starring James Rado, Gerome Ragni, Lynn Kellogg, and Sally
Eaton. |
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