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BIG LOVE In Charles L. Mee’s Obie Award winning play Big Love, 50 brides are slated for arranged mass matrimony to 50 cousins. The young women rebel and flee to an Italian villa, where they ask for sanctuary. This dramatic scenario is based on what may be the earliest surviving play of the western world, Aeschylus' The Suppliant Women. Mee transformed this ancient inspiration (as well as musings from Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, Leo Buscaglia, Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M. manifesto, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon among others) into wildly funny reflections on love, men, women and contemporary society. These explosive insights are strewn like confetti throughout a raucous narrative that incorporates music, dance, mass murder and redemption. “Impressively interweaving a mix of mayhem, passion, lust and social consciousness-raising rhetoric . . . a volatile, thoroughly entertaining one-acter.” VARIETY Since its conspicuous debut at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 2000, Charles L. Mee’s Big Love has been sending critics running to their reference books for help describing and analyzing it. That's because Mee freely juggles pop culture, ancient myths, ethical conundrums, contrary theatrical styles and, not least, that old mystery -- love. A cultural and political historian for more than twenty years, Mee’s books include Playing God: seven fateful moments when great men met to change the world (1993). As a playwright Mee is best known for his radical reworking of Greek tragedies, including Orestes and The Trojan Women a Love Story, both based on plays by Euripides and staged at the A.R.T. Institute by Tina Landau and Robert Woodruff respectively. Charles Mee's work is made possible by the support of Richard B. Fisher and Jeanne Donovan Fisher. An archive of his plays is available on the Internet at www.charlesmee.org. Mee has said, "the Greeks make us smart." And so does Mee, with this wondrous, wacky play about love, gender, history, society and the mystery of motivation in life. “BEST OF 2002”--LA TIMES. For Theatre at UBC, MFA candidate Joanna Garfinkel has directed The Skin of Our Teeth, The Dispute and Bear, and she was assistant director for KJ Sanchez's critically acclaimed production of The House of Atreus. Before coming to Vancouver, Garfinkel resided in Austin, Texas where she co-created 2004's Bonfire Festival and directed three original works within it. Other credits include: Don't Drown for the Rude Mechanicals (nominated for two Austin Critics' Table Awards), Honey for Frontera Fest (nominated for Best of Fest), and Maria Irene Fornes' Mud for iron belly muses. In tackling Big Love Garfinkel heads up an ensemble of nine actors including professional actor Daryl King who is a recent graduate of Studio 58 at Langara College. The rest of our cast is comprised of final and intermediate year students in Theatre at UBC’s BFA Acting program: Yoshie Bancroft, Cecile Roslin, Courtney Lancaster, Joanna Rannelli, Evan Frayne, Kevin
Warning: Nudity, coarse language, violent imagery and a cake fight. TELUS Studio Theatre [6265 Crescent Rd, Gate 3 UBC campus] |
