FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
November 6, 2009
Contact:
Elizabeth Blevins, Director, Office of Communications
Office: (740) 351-3810; FAX: (740) 351-3179; Cell: (740) 464-4854
940 Second Street – Portsmouth, Ohio 45662
E-mail: eblevins@shawnee.edu
Web site: www.shawnee.edu
Shawnee State University
Theatre opens season with ‘The House of Blue Leaves’
“A brilliant play ... beautifully fashioned ... wacky and
sometimes sad [with] combined hilarity, poignancy,
outrageous stage aside and tragedy.” New York Daily News.
The Shawnee
State University Theatre announces the upcoming 2009 fall
theatre production of “The House of Blue Leaves.” The staged
production will be presented in four performances in the
Kahl Studio Theatre at SSU’s Vern Riffe Center for the Arts
beginning at 7:30 p.m. on November 18, 19, 20 and 21.
“The House of
Blue Leaves” was written by John Guare, who later wrote “Six
Degrees of Separation.” He is the winner of the 1971 Critics
Award and the Obie Award for the Best American Play, and the
1986 revival was winner of four Tony Awards.
The play is
set in 1965, Queens, New York. Artie Shaughnessy, a zoo
attendant played by Jerry Brown, dreams of becoming a
successful songwriter while his cuckoo wife, Bananas, played
by Kit Kongos, and his mistress from downstairs, Bunny,
played by Andrea Gerlach, are awaiting the arrival of the
pope to New York. Meanwhile, his son, Ronnie, played by Ryan
O’Donnell, goes AWOL from Fort Dix secretly preparing to
blow up His Holiness at Yankee Stadium.
Billy Einhorn,
played by Jacob Packer, Artie’s old school buddy and a
successful Hollywood director, arrives with his starlet
girlfriend in tow. Billy holds the key to Artie's dreams of
getting out of Queens and away from the life he so despises.
Together with a trio of Nuns, the Military Police and a
Sanitarium Orderly, the plot and the characters collide in
an explosion of surprises.
The students
who make up the cast of the play are Meredith Francis as
Corrinna Stroller; Amy Strickland as a Head Nun; Natosha
Massie as a Second Nun; Emily Crabtree as the Little Nun;
Ben Ott as an M.P.; and Chanan Brown as the White Man.
Stage manager
for “The House of Blue Leaves” is Ammie Phipps. The play is
for mature audiences, produced by special arrangement with
Samuel French Inc.
General
Admission is $6.00 and tickets may be purchased at the
McKinley Box Office at the Vern Riffe Center for the Arts.
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