Two Class Acts: A Festival Celebrating A.R. Gurney
Opening Night: October 10, 2016
Closing: November 14, 2016
Theater: 37 Arts Theatre
This festival includes two world-premiere one-act plays, Squash and Ajax. These two plays will be the final productions at The Flea’s home on White Street, before the company moves to its new facilities four blocks south at 20 Thomas Street. In Squash, a professor of classic literature finds himself questioning his identity when a student presents an intriguing take on Plato’s Symposium. Boundaries are tested and personal lives are upended as they grapple with sexuality, love, and sport. In Ajax, an intrepid student adapts Sophocles’ defining war epic to the amusement of his English professor. A passionate ex-actress, the professor quickly finds herself entangled in every aspect of the play –– including the playwright.
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October 28, 2016
A tickling breeze of possibilities ripples through “Two Class Acts,” short plays of modern love and ancient days now running in repertory at the Flea Theater. That spirit, with its enthusiastic sense of art’s potential to portray and effect transformations, is youthful in nature. And it feels appropriate that the performers in these productions would all seem to be on the sunny side of 30. Of course, the writer of these plays is more than half a century older than that — 85, to be exact. But that youthful feeling I’m talking about, rooted in a dewy, almost naïve infatuation with theater, is inherent in his latest scripts, “Ajax” and “Squash,” both of which are set in academia, where learning is often extracurricular.
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