Événement

How the Other Half Loves

Three men, three women. Originally produced at Scarborough in the round, our production will be in transverse staging with the audience on either side of a central acting area shared by the Foster and Phillips apartments at either end. Seating for fifty with the audience within five to ten feet of the actors.

About the show:

"An ingenious, funny and brilliantly crafted masterpiece, which juggles time and space to present the lives and loves, passion and panic of three married couples in a play of love and laughter, meals and mayhem. Like all of Alan Ayckbourn's comedies it is about the precise interaction of sex and class in modern English society.

Bob Phillip's liaison with his boss's wife is in danger of being discovered by their respective spouses. Each attempt to wriggle out of suspicion by projecting their own infidelity on to a third, totally innocent, uninteresting and unsuspecting couple in the Featherstones. The action takes place at two dinner parties given on different nights. The single set is almost a character in itself, so important is it to the action. It represents two living-dining rooms at once. The furniture and often the people of the two places - are intermingled, most notably in the scene that closes the first act, when one hapless couple is having Thursday night dinner with another pair and Friday night dinner with the third.

The ensuing action leads to a string of misunderstandings and almost farcical events with hilarious consequences in one of Alan Ayckbourn's best loved comedies. Like all first-rate comedies, the play is only funny because it tackles serious issues. "I firmly believe that what distinguishes the good comedy or farce from the mediocre specimen is that the former always has a kernel of reality: (Ayckbourn) is really a regional writer exploiting a traditional metropolitan form, the farcical comedy. And into it he injects a wealth of unobtrusively accurate social detail: but the kind that just gets mentioned in passing." Michael Billington." (1)

There are five performances (four evening and one matinee) at the Fred Meitzer stage at the Redmond Senior Center on 2/15, 2/16, 2/17 matinee, 2/22, 2/23.

(1) Ivoryton Playhouse, Ivoryton, CT