BackStage Theatre Company Announces its 2009-2010 Tenth Anniversary Season
CHICAGO – Step Inside. Artistic Director Matthew Reeder BackStage Theatre Company and announce their Tenth Anniversary Season performing at the Chopin Studio Theatre, 1543 W. Division, Chicago. The season features great playwrights, challenging roles and big thematic ideas.
This marks the tenth season for BackStage Theatre Company, now under the Artistic Direction of Matthew Reeder. Reeder says “The three shows selected will provide BackStage with a real chance to produce elegantly and professionally while re-introducing ourselves and our audiences to the essence of the theatrical . . . to get back to the basics; great playwrights, challenging roles and big thematic ideas. All three shows not only fit our mission, but they have a thematic or structural ‘outrageousness’ that echoes BackStage’s history of ‘big theatre in small places.’ By embracing the theatrical mode of storytelling, and by presenting an audience with the simplicity of great acting, nuanced direction and compelling scripts, we are laying ourselves bare and saying …’Welcome to the family.’”
Aunt Dan and Lemon, by Wallace Shawn Nov/Dec 2009 Directed by Artistic Director Matthew Reeder
BackStage begins its 10th Anniversary Season by asking you to step inside the bedroom of a woman called Lemon. Lemon has a story to tell. What begins as a deceptively simple coming-of-age yarn about her seemingly ordinary family soon becomes a complex meditation on the persuasive power of intimacy. Written by one of the more controversial playwrights of the contemporary American theatre, Aunt Dan and Lemon is a both a mordant comedy and a chilling cautionary tale about the subversive nature of influence.
Orange Flower Water, by Craig Wright Early Spring 2010
After years of maintaining a close, platonic friendship, David and Beth begin an inescapable love-affair with heartbreaking consequences. Through a series of theatrical, voyeuristic scenes which all take place on or around a single bed, we see the painfully intense unraveling of both troubled marriages and, eventually, the construction of a very fragile but authentic new beginning for everyone concerned. Written by one of the most promising young playwrights of this generation, Craig Wright’s “Orange Flower Water” is an unsparing but ultimately hopeful examination of the unremitting need that humans beings have for one another.
The Play About the Baby, by Edward Albee Late Spring 2010
Two chairs stand in a private room inhabited by a gleefully naive couple whose youthful desire for each other is hardly interrupted by the coming of their first child. Soon, however, their playfully sexual exploits are bizarrely interrupted by a mysterious and nameless older couple who may (or may not) have sinister motives. Penned by one of America’s preeminent playwrights, The Play About the Baby is an absurdist black comedy, reminiscent of burlesque in it’s high spirits and banter, that grapples with such issues as reality and the games we play to define it, the ambiguity of existence, and the agonizing bonds between parents and children.
About BackStage Theatre Company
BackStage is currently closing a critically acclaimed ninth season with John Kolvebach’s “On An Average Day. This season builds upon one of BackStage’s most successful seasons to date with the wildly popular and critically acclaimed, Bloody Bess: A Tale of Piracy and Revenge, the Jeff Nominated Waiting For Lefty and the critically acclaimed How I Learned to Drive. BackStage Theatre Company has received Jeff Recommendations for Terra Nova in 2004 and Medea in 2006 as well as a Nomination and Citation for The Skin of our Teeth in 2006 (Best Actress in a Principle Role, Play).
BackStage Theatre Company is dedicated to the exploration of family. Through the creation of bold and eclectic productions, BackStage questions and examines what family means socially, spiritually, economically, emotionally, politically, and culturally. BackStage strives to present original plays, Chicago premieres and fresh interpretations of established works in an effort to promote the growth of all families in its audience.
