Culture Connection Theater presents
SPACE IN-BETWEEN: One-acts by French female playwrights Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute
An evening of short plays that explores the relationships between people and the spaces that divide them
WHEN: January 8 – 17; previews on Thursday, January 8, and opens on Friday, January 9, at 8 PM. Regular performances run January 9, 10, 14, 15, 16 and 17 at 8 PM and Sunday, January 11, at 7 PM. There will be two Saturday matinees on January 10 and 17 at 3 PM.
WHERE: Luna Stage Studio Theatre, 555 Valley Road, West Orange
ADMISSION: $20; $10 for students; $15 for groups of 10 or more (advance group sales only.)
For reservations call Brown Paper Tickets at 1-800-838-3006, ext. 1 or go to http://spaceinbetween.brownpapertickets.com.
www.cultureconnectiontheater.org
FEATURING: Gloria Lamoureux, Jacqueline Schreiber, Jason Howard and Scott McGowan
Space In-between offers an intimate evening of theater for four actors, two women and two men, staged in the round to embody the mind spaces created by French female playwrights and new novel writers Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute. Their one- act plays “Savannah Bay” and “Over Nothing At All” capture the spaces in between the walls of our minds, in between two actors on stage, in between people of different cultures and languages and the space in between male and female worlds.
Savannah Bay by Marguerite Duras evokes the fierceness and the gentleness of a relationship between an older woman and a younger one as they accompany each other through a memory filled landscape of the mind. The older woman, an aging grande dame actress, wishes both to forget and to retain her memories while the younger woman needs to discover herself through the older woman’s tenuously failing memory. Over afternoon tea, the two women remember a girl who died in a warm sea in Indochina many years before and retell her story of impossible love. They are sustained through their shared connection to this girl and to each other. Writer Marguerite Duras, best known for her hauntingly beautiful and scandalous novel The Lover, for which she won the Prix Goncourt, brings her trademark poetic, impressionistic language and themes of the passion of impossible love, loss, regret and memory to this delicate play.
Over Nothing At All by Nathalie Sarraute explores the hidden competition between two life-long male friends, one a successful academic, the other a frustrated poet, who have a falling out seemingly over nothing at all, and who call in two neighbors as jurors to make a judgment on their case. As their dispute progresses, a subtext of condescension, jealousy and mutual envy surfaces, covered up by years of proclaiming their enduring friendship. Nathalie Sarraute, a pioneer of the new novel, uses what she calls “tropisms” or everyday phrases to explore a hidden underworld of internal voices who howl with fear and pain at having to confront the public exterior world. In Sarraute’s play, the characters attempt to speak the unspeakable and barely knowable. What seems minimal at first is revealed to be enormous in dramatic tension and personal implications for both of the men and their relationship to one another.
Elaine Molinaro (director, co-producer) is the founder of Culture Connection Theater (CCT). Productions through CCT including: Tidings Brought To Mary by Paul Claudel, Roar by Betty Shamieh and Opera Buffoonia by Pascal Sagratella. In NJ, she has also directed for the UCC Players, Centenary Stage Co. and Dreamcatcher RepOther directing credits include Cleantopia by Rachael Richman (The Cell), direction and choreography for Obie award winning the West Village Fragments and the East Village Fragments (Peculiar Works Project), Prometheus Bound (Lincoln Center Director’s Lab), The Long Shot (Circle East), As You Like It (Marist College) Black by Joyce Carol Oates (Rutgers Theater Co.), A MidSummer Night's Dream (Voice & Vision), Facing Open Fields (HERE) and Be Silent Be Still (Peculiar Works Project). She assisted for Ping Chong & Co. and at the George St. Playhouse.
Jonathan Green (designer, co-producer): Worked as a designer for theatre forr 20 years and was a member of United Scenic Artists, Local USA 829. He has designed for Signature Theater, NYC, often as a co-designer with Teresa Snider-Stein, as well as productions at the WPA Theater and Joseph Papp Public Theater. Jonathan Green has assisted William Ivey Long, Jess Goldstein, David Woolard, and Jane Greenwood. He designed the costumes for the film “The First Seven Years” starring Carol Kane. Recently, Mr. Green has directed in the Montclair area.
Culture Connection Theater (www.cultureconnectiontheater.org) has the mission to foster connection between people of different countries. Culture Connection Theater produces collaborations between artists of different cultures in order to break down barriers of racism, sexism and prejudice, to allow American audiences to experience other cultures, to shed light on our own culture and to engage, comment and ask questions about world events.
