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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Company One Ups Itself: Producing
Changing Theatre for the Changing Times
Company One
continues its edgy, provocative programming for the second show of its
eighth season with Gina Gionfriddo’s dark exploration, AFTER ASHLEY. A
2004 Humana Festival smash, ASHLEY is a probing drama that takes a turn
on our culture’s obsession with voyeurism.
“Gionfriddo sets the perfect trap,”
muses Company One director Shawn LaCount, who also directs ASHLEY.
“As an audience, we gape at the characters’ capabilities to go to
extremes, only to realize that we are drawn to the same repulsiveness as
they are.”
Gionfriddo uses this “repulsiveness,” to expose the intense humanity
buried underneath our often surface-level existence. “These
characters are in very specific and extreme circumstances, says LaCount
“but we see them entangled in the same struggles that many of us
experience – struggles of love, loyalty, and trying to do what’s right;
trying to stand by our convictions – sometimes at any cost. That’s
what draws the audience in and that’s what is, in many ways, really the
heart of the play. I think the issues at the play’s core will ring
painfully true with a lot of the audience.”
Maybe so. ASHLEY definitely hit the mark in Louisville,
where it debuted at the 2004 Humana Festival to rave reviews, and had
similar success in New York,
at the Vineyard Playhouse, with a cast including Kieran Culkin (Igby Goes
Down and brother of the infamous McCauley) and Anna Paquin (The Piano,
X-Men and others).
For its Boston
showing, LaCount has assembled a talented cast of newcomers and
veterans. Jonathan Orsini, playing Justin, around whom much of the
play revolves, is a Suffolk
University
student studying under Boston-area director Wes Savick. “He’s
perfect for the role,” says LaCount “with just the right mixture of
punchiness and understated angst.” LaCount also speaks highly of
the other cast members, Ana Nogueira, Ed Hoopman, Kelly Lawman, Lonnie
McAdoo and lifelong Bostonian Naheem Allah. “The cast is tremendous.
They’re the perfect group to really accentuate all the delicate nuances
of the script.”
The show, the second in Company One’s eighth season, is one more in a
string of shows that the company is bringing to Boston
straight from a New York
run. Less than three months after staging a knockout Boston
premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT,
Company One is, once again, importing New York’s hippest. “We are
always committed to local playwrights, but we also turn to New York as a
hotbed of the riskiest freshest shows from exciting playwrights,” LaCount
explains.
ASHLEY doesn’t disappoint in its ability to take risks, sporting a boldly
realistic form where the characters stumble their way from awkward moment
to awkward moment. While nobody is “voted off the island,” per se,
Gionfriddo clearly had the Survivor generation in mind when she penned
the piece. This ultra-reality is further enhanced by LaCount’s
intimate staging, which accentuates vivid life of the play. “I was
very careful not to over-direct this piece, because the script wouldn’t
stand for it. A lot of my work was giving the piece its own room to
live. By the end, I want the audience to feel the play’s breath on
the back of their necks.”
AFTER ASHLEY runs October 27 – November 18 at the BCA Plaza Theatre at
the Boston Center for the Arts. For
tickets, please visit www.BostonTheatreScene.com or Company One’s website www.CompanyOne.com.
By phone – 617.933.8600.
**PRESS NIGHT
IS SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28 AT 8PM. PLEASE RSVP IF POSSIBLE.
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