This Week in Theatre: You Can't Take It With You, The Real World?, Oil And Water, and As I Lay Dying
This week in theatre rounds up the most noteworthy live theatre playing right now in Toronto. It includes just-opened shows as well as productions that are about to close.
You Can't Take It With You / Soulpepper - Young Centre / 7:30pm / $22-$68
Soulpepper offers up the classic comedy You Can't Take It With You from Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, now onstage at the Young Centre. When Alice Sycamore brings home her suitor and his conservative parents for dinner, the two families don't exactly hit it off. The strong cast includes Diego Matamoros, Nancy Palk, Eric Peterson, Brenda Robins, and Mike Ross.
The Real World? / Tarragon Theatre / 8:00pm/2:30pm / $21-$51
Tarragon revives Michel Tremblay's The Real World? almost 25 years after it premiered on their stages in English. The play blends the realities of the outside world with those of the playing space â if playwrights write what they know, what happens when the figures in their life revolt as characters in their play? Tarragon has produced 13 of Tremblay's plays over the years.
Oil and Water / Factory Theatre / 8:00pm/2:00pm / $30-$40
Siminovitch Award-winning director Jillian Keiley, the recently announced new head of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre, brings Oil and Water to Toronto. The play is a retelling of the true story of Lanier Phillips, the only African-American survivor of a shipwreck in 1942 off the coast of Newfoundland. Complementing the action onstage, a ten-person cast sings an a cappella score mixing Newfoundland folk tradition with African-American gospel.
As I Lay Dying / Theatre Centre / 7:00pm/2:30pm / $15
Theatre Smith-Gilmour presents William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, one of the American novelist's most famous works. Faulkner's book is narrated by 15 different characters over 59 chapters, so it'll be interesting to see how the multiple perspectives and stream of consciousness writing are translated into the staging. An inventive and playful group of theatre makers, it's the type of challenge that Theatre S-G is more than qualified to achieve.
Clybourne Park / Berkeley Street Theatre / 8:00pm/2:00pm / $22-$49
This week is your last chance to see the Canadian Premiere of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Clybourne Park, a comedic riff on Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun. A satire set in suburban Chicago, the play has garnered accolades for its look at race relations through real estate over the span of fifty years. The half century which separates the two acts provides a neat frame of the subjects in Bruce Norris's play.
Photo from Oil and Water
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