HARRY IN LOVE - now playing!

[collisionwork]

I just realized I never did a proper announcement for the first two shows that have opened here or at the company MySpace . . . so here it is:




NOW PLAYING! - the first in the trio of August 2008 productions
from Gemini CollisionWorks at The Brick:

The Brick Theater, Inc.
presents
a Gemini CollisionWorks production of

Harry in Love:
A Manic Vaudeville

The return of the 1966 comedy by Richard Foreman

directed by Ian W. Hill
assisted by Berit Johnson

Harry Rosenfeld is a big, neurotic, unnerved and unnerving man who believes his wife, Hilda, is planning to cheat on him (and he seems to be right). His response: drug her coffee and keep her knocked out until her paramour goes away. The plan works about as well as should be expected and, over several days, a number of people – the paramour, a doctor, Hilda’s brother, and an “innocent” bystander - are sucked into Harry's manic, snowballing energy as it becomes an eventual avalanche of (hysterically funny) psychosis.

Who wrote this crazed farce? Well, before he became known as the writer-director-designer of his groundbreaking and legendary abstract stage spectacles, Richard Foreman was seen as a promising playwright in a more, shall we say, traditional mode, writing “normal” plays with standard structures, characters, settings, and events, unlike those that he was to become known for from 1968 onward.

In 1966, he wrote Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville, which came very close to having a Broadway run, but due to creative conflicts, didn't make it. This “boulevard comedy” as Foreman calls it (he also compares it, accurately, to the 1960s plays of Murray Schisgal) remained unseen for over 30 years, until Foreman gave it to director/actor Ian W. Hill in 1999, for the third of the No Strings Attached festivals of Foreman’s plays that Hill produced at the Nada spaces on Ludlow Street, where it was done to appreciative audiences and got excellent reviews during its very short run, the only run this obscure work has ever had to date.

Now, Harry in Love is back, with half of the cast of the ’99 production, for a slightly-longer run in a slightly-larger production.

While we’re probably lucky and much better-off to have the Foreman we’ve had, it’s fascinating to see this (extremely funny) play which very well might have meant a very different career for Foreman if it had made in to Broadway. It's not what you probably know from him, but it still sounds like the Richard Foreman anyone would know from his later work – almost any line from this play, out of context, would not sound at all out of place in one of his later, more abstract plays. Really.

The cast of this production is
Walter Brandes*, Josephine Cashman*, Ian W. Hill,
Tom Reid, Ken Simon*, and Darius Stone*

at
The Brick
575 Metropolitan Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn 11211
½ a block from the Lorimer stop of the L Train
or Metropolitan-Grand stop of the G Train
www.bricktheater.com

August 8, 14, 17, and 22 at 7.30 pm
August 10, 16, 24 at 4.00 pm

approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes long (including one intermission)

All tickets $15.00

Tickets available at the door or through theatermania.com
(212-352-3101 or toll-free: 1-866-811-4111)

*appears courtesy of Actors Equity Association