THE
EXERCISE 1 man, 1 woman. Bare Stage. As the Long Island Press comments "Playwright Lewis John Carlino
has drawn a gripping and completely fascinating portrait of a man
and woman, trapped in an unreal and yet hauntingly real world, both
at the same time. They are actors, caught up in their hate-love game,
standing on a rehearsal stage living out their fears, and their fantasies
with almost uncontrollable vengeance. Desperation demands they play
on. Carlino calls them simply "The Actor" and "The Actress" They
appear early for a rehearsal on a bare stage. They begin to go over
lines for a new play. It is immediately apparent that they have been
lovers but that a strange anxiety has invaded this love. Soon they
decide to try a bit of "improvisation" It is then that the hate-love
world, riddled with fear and insecurity, comes forth. Reality turns
on and off like the footlights. One minute he is acting out a "scene" about
a mythical Irish uncle seducing the local barmaid. The scene changes
almost nightmare style and they are both reliving a very real and
dreadful episode in their own lives. They seem always trying to bring
life into focus. It is a desperate struggle for them." But a struggle
which, in the end, purges them of the nagging repressions and fears
which have poisoned their psyches, leaving them free at last to face
and know themselves and the world to which they must relate. Exit
the King. Play. Eugene lonesco. Translated by
Donald Watson King Berenger has only the duration of the play to live. His kingdom
has shrunk to the confines of his garden wall, his nation reduced
to the six within his throne-room. Once, it seemed, he ruled over
an immense empire now he cannot command even the movements of his
own body. Like Everyman, Berenger has lived from day to day, and
there is now no more time. The
Exorcism. A Ghost Story. Don Taylor Dan and Margaret have come to spend Christmas with Rachel and Edmund
in their renovated seventeenth-century labourer's cottage. Later,
as Rachel plays the piano, she suddenly gets a sinister feeling of déjà vu.
Shortly afterwards, the electricity fails and the phone is out of
order too. It is the start of a series of macabre events which mount
relentlessly to a bizarre and terrifying climax culminating in a
tragic report coming from the TV into an empty brightly-lit room. An
Experiment with an Air Pump. Play. Shelagh Stephenson 1799-On the eve of a new century, the house buzzes with scientific experiments, furtive romance and farcical amateur dramatics. 1999 - In a world of scientific chaos, cloning and genetic engineering, the cellar of the same house reveals a dark secret buried for 200 years. Shelagh Stephenson's daring and thoughtful play, inspired by the painting of Joseph Wright of Derby, was joint recipient of the 1997 Margaret Ramsay Award. Extremities. Play.
William Mastrosimone Helen Mirren and Kevin McNally starred at the Duchess Theatre, London,
in this drama about a young woman who is attacked in her own home
by a rapist. She manages to overpower the man and imprisons him.
When her roommates return, they have to try to talk the victim out
of her ultimate revenge. (NB. This play contains violent scenes and
explicit language.) '... all the tensions of the classic thriller
... an extraordinary humanity...' Daily Mail EYE
OF GOD In a small Oklahoma town, an innocent girl, Ainsley, marries a just-released
convict with whom she's corresponded for 3 years. Jack's never told
her why he went to jail, and with his new-found religion he says
it doesn't matter: providence has seen to it that he would marry
a good woman and raise a family. The clues are all there for Ainsley,
but she's never been in love before. so when Jack has to wear an
electronic surveillance device, she doesn't question it. It's just
after Jack's parole officer stops by and tells Ainsley, in Jack's
absence, that Jack went to prison for beating a girl and killing
her unborn child, that Ainsley realises she's pregnant. Interwoven
with the above plot is a future story line: a young girl has been
found dead in a nearby lake, her belly slit open and her eyes gouged
out. A 14-year-old named Tom witnessed the murder and has become
mute because of it. Or, did he do it? Eventually he hangs himself.
The police investigate the murder and feel sure the murderer was
Jack, but when interrogated by the police, he denies he's done anything
wrong. Finally giving up trying to believe in God and Jack, Ainsley
goes to Oklahoma City for an abortion. After the procedure, she runs
into the young boy, Tom. Feeling lonely and hopeless, she asks Tom
to drive her to the lake where she was conceived and born. He does,
and we see them share a tender moment of intimacy: Ainsley takes
out her glass eye and lets Tom put it back in for her. Behind the
clearing we see Jack, waiting for her, clearly aware that she's just
aborted their child. EYES
FOR CONSUELA A dishevelled man wakes from a sweat-drenching nightmare, furiously shaking his shirt and pants free of possible small jungle creatures, and hastily dresses to face the utterly dreamlike reality of remote Mexico, a torpid limbo. Henry is a lost soul from the American middle-class, middle aged and alone, a superfluous stranger to a wife he left hundreds of scattered miles away in snowbound Michigan, and now alone in a squalid, vine-shrouded "hotel" amid snakes, lizards and ghosts. The owner of the makeshift inn, one-eyed Viejo, warns him to stay
put for his own safety, but on a brief, circular walk through the
underbrush he is set upon by a peasant named Amado. The predatory
figure bears a machete and a slender knife which he will use to cut
the eyes from Henry's head, he tells the incredulous American, in
order to present this penitent, macabre offering of "a bouquet of
blue eyes" to the bewitching Consuela.. The fervour of Amado's obsessed
mission, his dizzying persuasiveness, and his menacing wit and insight,
push Henry's sanity to its limits. In a duel of ironic pathos, humour,
cruelty and metaphor, each man examines what has taken him from the
woman he loves and what desperate sacrificial price might reunite
him with her. At the point when the gracefully haunting Consuela
appears before Henry only to dismiss his brown eyes, the sole road
out of the tangled tropical forest seems indistinct but at last possible. |