season
The Baltimore Waltz-- Spring 2012
This spring the rice players will be putting on The Baltimore Waltz, a play by Paula Vogel. Directed by our very own TJ Burleson and Susannah Eig and produced by Rice Students, the show runs Thursday thru Saturday, 3/30-4/1 and 4/5-4/7. All shows are at 8PM at Hamman Hall, exit 21 off Rice Blvd.
"When Anna is diagnosed with a fatal malady, "Acquired Toilet Disease," she and her brother Carl decide to make their way through Europe in the time Anna has left. As the play unravels, it becomes clear that the world the characters are inhabiting is not real. We realize that this is all a dream. Anna is passing through the six stages of grief and finds herself living it up in the seventh: Lust. As the siblings travel through Europe -- from comic vignette to comic vignette -- they encounter foreign men of all sorts (all played by the third actor or "Third Man").
While the play does occur as a colorful and loud dream sequence, it remains intimate with its small cast. The combination of big ideas and small numbers of actors makes it fresh in its presentation.
Grief, guilt, and regret all play a huge part in this show. The playwright, Paula Vogel, is dealing with her own guilt over not having taken a eurotrip with her ailing brother who died of AIDS. Anna and Carl each deal with their own grief and try to overcome their regrets. The play is fascinating at every stop along the metaphorical road through Europe. As Anna and Carl hope for a cure and struggle to be thankful for the time they have, the audience gains a unique understanding of the hardships that families, friends, loved ones, and individuals had to and still have to deal with when tragedy strikes.
While the topics are difficult to deal with and often dark, Vogel's comedic style and brave dialogue make the play more hopeful than anything else."
-TJ and Susannah
Dead Man's Cell Phone-- Fall 2011
The Rice Players are proud to be performing Dead Man's Cell Phone, a play by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Joseph "Chepe" Lockett and produced by Rice Students, the show runs Thursday 9/22 through Saturday 9/24 and Thursday 9/29 through Saturday 10/1. All shows are at 8PM at Hamman Hall, exit 21 off Rice Blvd.
After you're gone, how will you be remembered? Do the devices that drive our compulsively communicative society really connect us, or just isolate us? And what do caramel popcorn and embossed invitations have to do with romance, Johannesburg, and the letter Z?
These are all questions that drive Sarah Ruhl's absurdist romantic comedy Dead Man's Cell Phone, a play that "blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure, the patently bizarre and the bizarrely moving" (Charles Isherwood, New York Times).
When the normally restrained Jean finds her meal at a quiet diner disrupted by her neighbor's ringing phone — a call he can't answer, reasonably enough, because he is deceased — she soon finds it opens the way to a looking-glass world of mystery, treachery, love, and confusion. From city streets to high society, from airport lounges to the stratospheric laundromats of heaven, Dead Man's Cell Phone offers up quirkily real people navigating their way through surrealist fantasies. The characters struggle to find their way through the morass of mundanity, guided by the illogic of their dreams and feelings.
Dead Man's Cell Phone premiered in New York City in 2008, starring Mary-Louise Parker, of fame for her roles in Angels in America on stage and Weeds on television. The play has subsequently been produced by the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Playwright Sarah Ruhl was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and a 2006 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for "creating vivid and adventurous theatrical works that poignantly juxtapose the mundane aspects of daily life with mythic themes of love and war." Of her own work, she writes, ""I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life…. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They're pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn't a wound being excavated from childhood."
-Chepe
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