Playwright Christopher Durang is best known for works of outrageous and often absurd comedy. Now with his latest Tony award winning effort, he has dared to take from Anton Chekhov some names and themes, put them into his creative blender and come up with a modern production that the New York Times described as a “sunny play about gloomy people”!
“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” is a comedy that pokes fun at Chekov’s universal truths (although you definitely do not have to be a Chekovian to enjoy it). Here we have Vanya and Sonia, brother and sister, creatures of habit spending their days in their parents’ old house in modern day Pennsylvania. Enter sister Masha the vain, famous, fading actress of shlock horror movies who thinks she would have been wonderful doing the classics (oh yes and a veteran of five marriages).
Add to the mix Masha’s too-young lover Spike, who loves to show off his physique, Nina the star struck ingénue and Cassandra the cleaning lady and soothsayer who sees into the (very immediate) future and uses voodoo dolls to good effect, and you now have a hilarious show that is smart and pleasing to all.
A classic dark comedy that is as funny as it is famous, Arsenic and Old Lace centres on the elderly Brewster sisters; the town darlings who have a little secret. Their nephew Mortimer discovers they are “helping” lonely gentlemen boarders to early graves by way of homemade, arsenic-laced wine. Throw in one brother who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt, a second who is a murderous criminal on the lam and then the girl next door that Mortimer wants to marry — and you have a recipe for hilarity.
Anne of Green Gables follows the misadventures of a wildly independent orphan with fiery red hair and a temper to match. Cherished by generations, L.M. Montgomery’s timeless classic comes to life in a new musical commissioned by the award-winning Theatreworks USA.
Anne Shirley is mistakenly sent to live with a plainspoken farmer and his spinster sister, who thought they were adopting a boy! She wins over the Cuthberts and all of Prince Edward Island with her irrepressible spirit and imagination – and wins over audiences with this warm, poignant story about love, home and family.
Note: All plays are subject to the performance rights being available.
Anna MacLean is a teenager, thrilled with her new diary, and flush with excitement at all of the handsome soldiers in the streets of Halifax. Though Anna’s mother and her best friend, Elsie Shultz, talk of the war, Anna can only think about whether the young man at the door enforcing the blackout order thought she was pretty. The next morning, their world collapses. Shatter explores the little-known details of the aftermath of the Halifax Explosion of 1917. A taut, exciting, and moving drama, it examines our strengths and weaknesses due to fear amidst the uncertainty of tomorrow.
Eddie Jester is a struggling stand-up comic. He’s broke and very recently has been mugged, shot at and is lying comatose in a hospital bed. Except, his disembodied spirit now roams alive and well. His visiting friends, loved ones and hospital staff think he can’t hear what they are saying, but in fact, he can. Jester’s disembodied spirit offers up jokes, witty commentary and philosophical observations about everything going on around him in his hospital room.
Isolated in a British manor house, an English gentleman and his wife’s lover lock horns in a bitter match of wits. As each man ups the ante to gain superiority, events escalate out of control. What begins as a gentlemanly game of ‘stiff- upper-lip’ repartee to resolve their situation, descends into a cut-throat, ego-fueled determination to win. There can be only one outcome and it is deadly.
