EXTREME MAKEOVERS
We've all had moments when we wished to reinvent ourselves and present a new face to the world. But while a makeover is one way to change your life, this year's DalTheatre season depicts characters whose metamorphoses are far more extreme than anything offered in a beauty salon. An immortal man wakes up as a woman; a libertine manipulates appearances to get what he wants; a soulless town is transfigured by music; and a medical student remakes the lives of others. In these tales of transformation, DalTheatre explores our human longing to refashion ourselves and our world, in the hope that change can be for the better.
All evening performances at 7:30 pm, Saturday matinees at 2:00 pm. Tickets available September 5 at the Dalhousie Arts Centre Box Office. Tel. 902.494.3820 or 1.800.874.1669. $15 / $10 for individual tickets or purchase a 5-event package and save! See details in our Season brochure or contact the FSPA office.
OCTOBER 10 - 14
ORLANDO
By Sarah Ruhl
Adapted from the novel by Virginia Woolf
Directed by Matthew Walker
David Mack. Murray Studio
No one understands the art of the makeover better than Orlando. Born into Elizabethan England as a beautiful nobleman, he meets Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare. Nearly one hundred years later, Orlando wakes up one morning still young and beautiful ... but now he is a she. And that is just the beginning of her adventures! In Sasrah Ruhl's poetic, touching, and hilarious adaptation of Virginia Woolf's classic novel, Orlando's journeys through time, gender, love, and art invite us to reflect upon humanity's endless capacity for transformation - and upon the joys, as well as the challenges, of our own ever-changing identities.
NOVEMBER 28 - DECEMBER 2
THE MAN OF MODE
By George Etherege
Directed by Margot Dionne
Sir James Dunn Theatre
"Forms and ceremonies, the only things that uphold quality and greatness, are now shamefully laid aside and neglected." So complains the fashionable charmer Dorimant, but with biting irony. For in this early comedy of manners from Restoration England, appearance matters more than truth; style matters more than substance; and, above all, social success depends on the ability to manipulate language. In this world of surfaces, disguises, and inconstancy, it is only through wit that George Etherege's men and women can remake themselves and find their true place in society.
FEBRUARY 6 - 10
THE PIPER
By Colleen Murphy
Directed by Pamela Halstead
David Mack. Murray Studio
The town council of Hamelin is a self-absorbed corporate tyranny. It exploits its underclass - rats who dream of becoming human - and it ignores the anguish of its children, who still believe in love. Tensions are already building when change arrives in the form of the mysterious Piper, with whom the Mayor's daughter falls in love. When the Piper aids the council in their war against the rats, the transformative powers of his magical music will change their world forever. Colleen Murphy's re-imagining of the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is wildly funny but also stages the anger and sorrow of a society that needs to be reinvented at its core.
MARCH 27 - 31
DRUMS AND ORGANS, OR,
THE MODERN FRANKENSTEIN
Play by Gillian Clark
Music by Arthur Fairfax-Perry
Inspired by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Directed by Roberta Barker
Sir James Dunn Theatre
To what extremes will humanity go to create life out of death? This question haunted Mary Shelley when she wrote Frankenstein in 1818. In this new play by exciting young playwright Gillian Clark (Dal BA Theatre '13), it also haunts another Mary: a medical student in modern Halifax. With her gift for cardiac surgery and her annoying roommates, Mary seems as far from Shelley's brooding hero as could be, until a chance encounter forces her to grapple with the power - and the limitations - of the physicians's art. Commissioned to celebrate Dalhousie's 200th anniversary, Clark's funny and haunting play asks what ties 2018 to 1818, life to death ... and human beings to one another.
