Event

Identity Crisis

Beacon theater group cabot | andcompany is back at the Railroad Playhouse with "IDENTITY CRISIS," an evening of intense psychological dramas about finding out you are not who you think you are.

Churchill's "A Number" concerns itself with the psychological ramifications of human cloning. A young man is contacted by a hospital and told that as a boy his genetic material was taken and used to make "a number" of copies of himself. Confronting his father, who may or may not have been a part of this secret procedure, he finds his own rapidly unraveling mental state compounded by the arrival of one of "the others". What happens to notions of identity and individuality if there are several versions of you out there living very different lives? This taut play takes us into the literal DNA of these ideas, as a family is destroyed in the process. JJ Condon plays the various young copies in rapid succession, helped and/or foiled by their father, played by andcompany artistic director Cabot Parsons.

Wilson's "The Madness of Lady Bright" is a searing portrait of lust and loneliness, and holds a place in American theater history as being one of the first truly realistic portraits of a gay character on the stage. Leslie Bright, a nightclub performer in his evening persona, has a literal melt down on a hot August Sunday in his un-air conditioned New York City apartment. Parsons here takes the title roll, with Mr. Condon joined by Jeff Foley, who andcompany audiences will remember as the constable from last year's "Christie in Love." In this play the two young actors play the voices inside Lady Bright's head as she struggles to keep it together, becoming her mother, herself, her lovers, and her other shards of identity, pulling her apart in a psychological tug-of-war. Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama with his 1979 play "Talley's Folley."