DIFFERENT STAGES 2011–2012 SEASON

A comedy about a repertory company who come to the village of Inish and perform dark, psychologically introspective works from the likes of Chekov, Strindberg and Ibsen. The inhabitants start to develop neuroses, complexes and inhibitions like the characters of the plays. Finally, the villagers get fed up with all this navel–gazing and drive the company out in favor of being entertained by the circus.

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this comedy introduces us to the Sycamores, a family that delights in eccentricity. They may seem mad, but they show us that those who pursue convention for its own sake and who need to conform to society''s conventions are the maddest of us all. This play about living life to the fullest, following your own dreams, and daring to be unconventional has been a perennial since its debut in 1936.

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Sex. Perversion. Violence. These are the themes of the tales that drip from the ink–laden quills of the notoriously irreverent Marquis de Sade in this Obie Award winning play. Confined to the Charneton Asylum for the Insane for the outlandish escapades he'd committed during the Napoleonic Era, the Marquis continues to pen his stories to the delight of the young seamstress, Madeleine, and to the scorn of Charenton's devout Abbe DuCoulmeir. When the Abbe attempts to silence the Marquis by taking his quills, his ink, and his paper, something intriguing occurs: the Marquis still finds a way to voice his scandalous yarns. As the Abbe's religious devotion clashes with the Marquis's dedication to freedom of expression, the audience is treated to a tale of wit, irony, blasphemy, philosophy, and the struggle for power told partly as a blend of comedy of manners and Grand Guignol with a dash of grotesque exaggeration and a soupcon of gore.

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With humor and pathos, Good People, explores the struggles, shifting loyalties, and unshakeable hopes that come with having next to nothing in America. Set in Boston's Southie neighborhood, where a night on the town means a rousing night of bingo, where this month's paycheck barely covers last month's bills, we meet Margaret Walsh. Margaret has lost her job, is facing eviction, and scrambling to catch a break. When she re–acquaints with a friend from the old neighborhood, someone who is now a very successful doctor, she attempts to use their childhood acquaintance as a ticket to turning her life around. Good People is tough and tender and explores the tension of class in America. Pending availability of performance rights.

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Something is amiss in a Catholic boys' boarding school. The students have become sinister, furtive, and conspiratorial as they steal up and down staircases after hours. The menace erupts in savagery as the students torture one of their members and then another and then…. What is the disease that has settled in their souls? Who is torturing the crotchety classics professor by sending obscene photographs to his dying mother? And why? The answer is hate in its devilish forms of pride, envy, and jealousy a hate so perverse that is has infested the students and the staff. The New York Times called this play “a powerful melodrama the will thrill audiences for a long time to come.” Pending availability of performance rights.

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