'New Visions' Emerging Artists' Festival to showcase young playwright, directors
Muhlenberg College theater festival includes a play for young audiences, an original one-man show and a rarely-produced Stoppard play
Friday, March 14, 2014 08:17 AM
Emerging theatrical talents will be on display in Muhlenberg College's "New Visions" Emerging Artists' Festival, featuring plays directed by four senior directing students in the college's Department of Theatre & Dance.
Presented by the college every other year, the "New Visions" festival features rarely produced, avant-garde works for theater, and offers a rare opportunity for audiences to see the work of the next generation of up-and-coming theater artists. This year's festival includes three productions, performed in repertory. Benjamin Wald directs Tom Stoppard's rarely produced "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour." Alex McKhann directs "Still Life with Iris," Steven Dietz's fantastical adventure for young audiences. Matt Dicken will perform the world premiere of his one-man play "butyou'reaman, or The Seven Men I Came Out to in India," directed by Arthur Strimling.
The festival runs Wednesday through Sunday, March 19-23. "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" and "butyou'reaman" will be performed together for a single ticket price, March 19, 20 and 22 at 8 p.m. and March 23 at 2 p.m. "Still Life with Iris" will be performed March 21 at 8 p.m. and March 22 at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.
In "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour," Soviet dissident Alexander Ivanov has been imprisoned in a mental hospital until he admits that the statements he has made against the government were caused by a mental disorder. He shares a cell with a schizophrenic triangle player who believes he is in command of a symphony orchestra. Stoppard's politically charged black comedy serves as a powerful fable about truth and dissent and as an absurd fantasia, set to the music inside your head.
An out-since-age-13 American man, playwright and actor Matt Dicken navigates the cultural dangers of staging his recent travels in India as stories for an audience in the USA. Evoking intimate landscapes rich with political and sensual variety, Dicken asks what it means to find love in a yet-to-be-legalized body.
"Still Life with Iris" centers on a little girl's search for the simplest of things: home. Iris lives with her mom in the land of Nocturno—a magical place in which the workers make, by night, all of the things we see in the world by day. In Nocturno, memories reside not in people's minds but in their coats. In their desire to have the best of everything, the rulers of Nocturno take Iris away from her home to be their daughter. To ease the pain of this separation, they remove her memory coat, leaving her with no recollection of her home or family. All that remains of her past is a single button. Recommended for ages 8 and up.
Muhlenberg College is a liberal arts college of 2,200 students in Allentown, Pa. The college offers Bachelor of Arts degrees in theater and dance. The Princeton Review consistently ranks Muhlenberg's production program in the top ten in the nation, and the Fiske Guide to Colleges lists both the theater and dance programs among the top small college programs in the United States.
Tickets for either performance ("Still Life with Iris" or the combined "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" and "butyou'reaman") are $15 for adults and $8 for LVAIC students, faculty and staff and for patrons 17 and under. Combination tickets, including both performances, are $20 for adults, $12 for students, faculty and staff, and can be used for any two performances.
Performances are in the Studio Theatre, Trexler Pavilion for Theatre and Dance, Muhlenberg College, 2400 Chew St., Allentown. Performance information and tickets are available at 484-664-3333 or muhlenberg.edu/theatre
