[NEohioPAL] Cesear's Forum to present Edward Albee's MARRIAGE PLAY

[Greg Cesear]

Dear Neohiopal Friends:
 
Cesear's Forum will be presenting Edward Albee's Marriage Play, in an April 17th
through May 23rd run (with one Sunday Matinée, May 3rd at 3 pm) at Kennedy's Down Under, Playhouse Square. A vituperatively energetic marital duel between a couple in mid-life crisis, the play is alternately funny and somber. Dana Hart and Julia Kolibab will portray Jack and Jill (Gillian), a social climbing couple evaluating their investment failures and domestic bailout options. We hope you will mark your calendar! 
 
Edward Albee has garnered a wide variety of critical opinion, ranging from scathing to adoring. Many scholars have commended Albee's commitment to theatrical experimentation and refusal to pander to commercial pressures. Edward Albee wrote Marriage Play in 1987 during a period of disfavor from New York producers and critics. First presented in Vienna, the play was produced at New York’s Signature Theatre in 1993 and rediscovered at London's National Theatre in 2001. In his Guardian review, Michael Billington wrote: “American dramatists invariably end up as victims of their own myth: in a success-crazed culture they are never forgiven for failing to live up to their own early masterpieces. But if Edward Albee has suffered the same cruel fate as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, he has kept on trucking. {Marriage Play} shows he never lost his residual vitality.” 
 
Don Shewy interviewed Edward Albee for American Theatre in 1992: 
But because of the big success of Virginia Woolf, all these expectations were created. …I wonder if you can talk about the evolution of your feelings about the expectations that play created:
“Well, they want THAT one again. Son of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf Part 3. You know, Tennessee went through the same thing. People start saying, ‘Gee, he writes the same thing, he's repeating himself.’ Then he writes Camino Real, which is quite different, and everybody says, ‘Why doesn't he stick to what he knows?’”
 
In Marriage Play, Mr. Albee does, indeed, tap into the familiar theme of the failing marriage. Language is his essence and these characters comment on their literary allusions to love. “ I think they’re both highly individual, rarefied people who live in the real world,” according to Albee, whose reality of thought and feeling becomes personal to the spectator; or, as New York Times critic Ben Brantley puts it: “The friction that sends the minds of receptive theatergoers into exhilarated overdrive.”
 
Cesear’s Forum presents Edward Albee’s Marriage Play; Fri. & Sat. at 8 pm., April 17th through May 23rd (with one Sunday Matinée, May 3rd at 3 pm). Kennedy's Down Under, PlayhouseSquare, 1501 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. All seats $15. Call 216-241-6000 or www.playhousesquare.org. 
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