So, Murder becomes a play within a play with all but two of the characters portraying alternate personas to mask their true identities. The play embraces a favorite Shakespearean motif: the conflict between the apparent and the real. ![]() Remember Patrick Mahomes and the thirteen seconds? Faulty timing reduces the greatest talent to mediocrity and the most inspired stagecraft to bumbling ineptitude.Īmarillo LIttle Theatre’s recently-completed mainstage run of Murder on the Orient Express, pegged the timing down to the nano-second, and the ensuing collaboration of characters and staging produced a triumph! The supreme cosmic force governing not only the stage but much of life, is timing. Murder on the Orient Express: Amarillo Little Theatre He can be contacted at, at on Twitter and on Facebook. Tickets are $19 for adults, $16 for students and seniors, and $13 for children Thursdays and Sundays, and $21 for adults, $19 for students and seniors, and $15 for children Fridays and Saturdays.Ĭhip Chandler is a producer for Panhandle PBS. Friday, Saturday and April 12 and 13 and 2:30 p.m. "I'm frightened at how easily I can see what this guy is." I'm exploring parts of me I'm afraid would have come up if I hadn't married my wife when I did. "I'm going to places they don't normally let me go (in other plays). However viewers interpret the show, the actors said they are grateful for the challenge - and a bit intimidated by it, too. May said he hopes audiences "find some entertainment in it, but I would like to have them walking away with a reaffirmation of how important conversation is, how important friendship is." "If we're not careful, we're talking our way into justifications, and we don't want to do that." The cast "has worked very hard to try to find some logical aim and objectives for these characters" - see Shipman's theory about Hirst's long-dead lover - "but we're also embracing the lack of intent when we feel like that's what Pinter is trying to do," Crandall said. ![]() "But it's also got this weight on it, intentionally making us feel uncomfortable about humanity, if you will." "It's full of really clever humor, very witty, dry at times and irreverent," Crandall continued. "As the audience, you're trapped along with them and forced to decipher what they all want and why they're all here," Crandall said, "and, certainly, what all this obtuse conversation really means. "I think Pinter is writing about some of his own fears about success versus failure, love versus a lack of love," Crandall said.Ĭertainly the cracked-mirror duality of the successful poet Hirst and the failed writer Spooner suggests that, as does the presence of Foster and Briggs, who are willing to be caretakers for the increasingly addled Hirst in return for a warm bed, perhaps more. "I've read some comparing this room to purgatory."Ĭrandall, the director, says Pinter's being "existential - deliberately so." "You can go as deep as you want," Burns said. "He's stumbled into a threeway," Washburn asserted, extrapolating on the undefined but subtextually meaty relationship between Hirst and his two younger housemates, Foster (Patrick Burns) and Briggs (John May). Shipman, in particular, appeared pretty subsumed by his character - pacing and staring off into the distance when not needed for a photo or a conversation, verbose but somewhat unfocused when answering questions about the play and his loaded character.Īt one point, he described in substantial detail his theory - not included, at all, in Pinter's text - that Hirst was locked in mourning over the death of a woman with whom he had an affair years before the play's action.ĭon Washburn - who plays the interloper Spooner, who has been invited to Hirst's home for drinks and winds up up-ending the fragile peace in the home - has a more lurid theory. Pinter's heady existential comedy seems to have gotten its four actors and director Stephen Crandall into a philosophical state of mind, based on a lengthy interview and photo session last week. The haunting, bleak but funny play opens Thursday for a two-weekend run in the ALT Adventure Space, 2751 Civic Circle. ![]() Though he might as well be describing the experience of interviewing him, that's actually how veteran Amarillo Little Theatre actor Don Shipman characterizes his role as Hirst, a drunken intellectual trapped in a long, dark night of the soul with three other heavy drinkers in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. "It's been a scary, fun, frightening ride."
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |