| << Back 2/2/05 Warming Winter Fend off the cold with productions from HART’s Studio-F SMN Upcoming Studio-F features: • Christopher Durang’s “Sister Mary Ignatius
Explains It All To You” showing Feb. 25-27. Admission for these plays is $8 for adults, $5 for students. Friday and Saturday shows are at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 3 p.m. For reservations call the HART box office at 828.456.6322.
Want to explore new places? Meet some new people? From Tuna, Texas, to New York City’s Thomkins Square Park, from domineering nuns to cut-throat real-estate salesmen, all these places and people can be found at Studio-F at the Haywood Arts Regional Theater from now to early April. Studio-F, named in honor of HART founding members Rex and Libba Feichter, is an actor’s workshop, designed to be a place where actors and directors can explore new themes and different types of plays. Rather than grand-scale, universally popular musicals and family comedies, Studio productions are edgy, uncensored and may contain adult material. Each shows is scheduled for a single weekend run, but with enough audience demand — the studio seats only 70 so reservations are a must — productions may be held over an additional weekend. Such is the case with Studio-F’s season opener “Greater Tuna,” returning for a second weekend Feb. 4-6 after sell-out performances in January. Bob Baldridge and Tom Dewees, both local actors who have appeared together in a dozen plays, including “Tuna Christmas,” play more than a dozen parts in this portrait of a late summer day in Tuna, Texas, “the third smallest town in the state.” Under the capable direction of Julie Kinter, the two men begin the show as
radio announcers, giving Tuna the latest news until they realize
that the radio microphone was never turned on. Baldridge and Dewees
then go on to unfold this lively town for us by playing old women,
maiden aunts, preachers, derelicts, and many of the other citizens
of Tuna. Aided by four dressers — the costume changes in this
play sometimes occur at a mind-boggling pace — both actors
shine in this hilarious showcase of Southern mores and manners.
Antigone in New York Following up the comedy “Greater Tuna” on Feb. 11 and 12 is Janusz Glowacki’s sobering “Antigone in New York.” This show features Casey Dupree as Anita, Tom Dewees as Flea, Jack Ross as Sasha, and Charles Mills as the policeman. Under the direction of Richard Gays, these actors, all of whom performed together in the award-winning “Coyote on the Fence,” give us a vivid portrait of the homeless, using as their dramatic vehicle the story of Antigone, the young Greek woman who was refused the right to bury her brother by King Creon, did so anyway, and suffered the consequences. In “Antigone in New York,” Anita is a Puerto Rican woman who, her mother dead and her brother having absconded with the family money, suffers the lies and deceits of a lecherous landlord before being forced out of her apartment and into the streets. Schizophrenic, living out of a grocery cart, Anita learns that Paulie, a man she claims to have loved, has died and was buried by the city in Potter’s Field. Aided by two other homeless men — Sasha, a Russian Jew and painter who cannot get his life together in his new country, and Flea, a Polish immigrant who is drinking himself to death — Anita sets plans in motion to dig up Paulie’s body and return it for burial to Thompkins Square Park, where she believes Paulie will be surrounded by friends who care for him. Like Antigone, Anita runs into the power of the state, embodied in this play not by a Greek king but by a New York City policeman. Director Richard Gays feels that “Antigone in New York” is particularly timely considering the recent interest both in Asheville and in Waynesville regarding the homeless. Casey Dupree seconds the director’s take on the play, citing recent reports of local homeless people and the problems often faced by the elderly poor who may lack family or friends to help care for them. “There is also a lot of unemployment locally,” she said. |
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