Brandeis Magazine

Student actors will have another opportunity to collaborate with a playwright on the creation of never-before-played characters next semester as the Brandeis Theater Company extends its partnership with Primary Stages, a New York company whose managing director is Elliot Fox ’89.

Under the partnership, begun last year with Rogelio Martinez’ “Cocktail Time in Cuba,” students will work alongside  playwright Maria Alexandria Beech on “Little Monsters,” a new play under development. The plot involves an aspiring poet who lives a squalid existence with her mother in a New York City apartment but dreams of expanding her horizons and changing her future by finding a perfect man on the Internet.

The workshop format will not only allow students to experience the evolution of a play firsthand, but also afford audiences the opportunity to participate in post-performance discussions with the playwright and other members of the creative team. Performances will take place February 17–20, 2011.

This year’s season at BTC kicked off in early autumn with a production of Anton Chekhov’s classic “Three Sisters.” Slated for production November 18–21 is the musical “Sunday in the Park with George,” Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1985 show about French neo-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat and his pointillist masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” And last up on the BTC’s four-show roster is the April 28–May 1 offering “Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead” by Bert V. Royal, a dark parody that features everyone’s favorite comic strip kiddos as they move beyond the pumpkin patch and into high school, where they encounter drugs, sex, violence, and other causes of modern adolescent angst. Good grief!