The Pearl Theatre Company 2016 – 2017
Season Update
A Taste of Honey
by Shelagh Delaney – Directed by Austin Pendleton
September 06 – October 16, 2016
A Taste of Honey is the first play by the British dramatist Shelagh Delaney, written when she was 18. It was initially intended as a novel, but she turned it into a play because she hoped to revitalise British theatre and to address social issues that she felt were not being presented. The play was first produced by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and was premiered at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, a small fringe theatre in London, on 27 May 1958. The production then transferred to the larger Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End on 10 February 1959. The play was adapted into an award-winning film of the same title in 1961.
A Taste of Honey is set in Salford in North West England in the 1950s. It tells the story of Jo, a seventeen-year-old working class girl, and her mother, Helen, who is presented as crude and sexually indiscriminate. Helen leaves Jo alone in their new flat after she begins a relationship with Peter, a rich lover who is younger than her. At the same time Jo begins a romantic relationship with Jimmy, a black sailor. He proposes marriage but then goes to sea, leaving Jo pregnant and alone. She finds lodgings with a homosexual acquaintance, Geoffrey, who assumes the role of surrogate father. Helen returns after leaving her lover and the future of Jo’s new home is put into question.
Public Enemy
Version by David Harrower – Directed by Hal Brooks
Sept 29 – Oct 29, 2016
Ibsen’s parable of the collision of truth and politics in the public sphere takes on new immediacy in this punchy and raw adaptation from the playwright behind Broadway’s Blackbird. When Dr. Stockman finds that the town’s tourist-friendly baths contain lethal levels of toxins, he sets out to clear the air and quickly finds his friends and neighbors poisoned against him.
David Harrower (born in 1966) is a Scottish playwright who (as of 2005) lives in Glasgow.
Harrower’s first play, Knives in Hens, which premiered at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 1995, was considered a critical and popular success. It deals with a relationship triangle in a rural setting, and a woman’s internal quest to find out what she wants from life. In 2005, his play Blackbird was produced by the Edinburgh International Festival, directed by Peter Stein and transferred in February 2006 to the Albery Theatre in London’s West End. It depicts the meeting between a young woman and a middle-aged man with whom, fifteen years earlier, at the age of 12, she had had a sexual relationship.
Vanity Fair
Novel by William Thackery
Adapted by Kate Hamill – Directed by Eric Tucker
Mar 24 – Apr 25, 2017
Adapted by Kate Hamill (Sense & Sensibility) from William Thackeray’s masterpiece, Vanity Fairexposes a society that cares more for good birth and good manners than for skill. But Becky Sharp, poor, plain, and devilishly clever, is determined to defy the odds through risky romantic entanglements, shady business practices, and social climbing at any cost; she won’t stop until the world lies at her feet.
Kate Hamill
Originally from the farms and fields of upstate New York, Kate is an award-winning NYC-based actor/playwright. She works regularly off-Broadway, off-off Broadway, and regionally, as well as in film.
In 2014, her adaptation of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY (in which she originated the role of Marianne) had its world premiere off-Broadway with critically-acclaimed theater troupe Bedlam, directed by Eric Tucker. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY was named “Top Ten Theater of 2014″ by both Ben Brantley of the NY Times, and by the Huffington Post, which called it “the greatest stage adaptation of this novel in history.” It was also a Wall Street Journal, TimeOut, and New York Times Critic’s Pick.
Rhinoceros
by Eugene Ionesco – Directed by Hal Brooks
Apr 17 – May 13, 2017
What better way to expose the dangers of social stagnation, unexamined groupthink, and burgeoning totalitarianism, than through spontaneous animal transformation? Ionesco’s blunt satire rampages through a world of everyday people at first perplexed and then swept up in the most outlandish cultural makeover ever devised. After all, “rhinocification” can happen to anyone—so keep your eyes open.
Rhinoceros is a play by Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959. The play was included in Martin Esslin’s study of post-war avant garde drama, “The Theatre of the Absurd”, although scholars have also rejected this label as too interpretatively narrow. Over the course of three acts, the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses; ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, Bérenger, a flustered everyman figure who is initially criticized in the play for his drinking, tardiness, and slovenly lifestyle and then, later, for his increasing paranoia and obsession with the rhinoceroses.
The Pearl Theatre Company
As New York’s only classical resident company, The Pearl is a theatre where past becomes present. As the advocate for significant plays across history, The Pearl protects and honors the spirit of every play, while also guiding its artistic evolution for future generations. Striking the balance between heritage and innovation, The Pearl explores acknowledged masterpieces, lost treasures, and contemporary adaptations, serving as a nexus of theatrical past, present, and future.
Pearl Theatre Co. Official More Information and Tickets WebSite HERE
Founded in 1984 by Shepard Sobel and a small troupe of artists in Chelsea, The Pearl has grown into a renowned Off-Broadway company. The Pearl connects audiences to timeless classic plays, while providing an artistic home to theatre professionals, especially its core company of resident actors.
The Pearl has garnered numerous awards, including most recently, a special 2011 Drama Desk Award for “notable productions of classic plays and nurturing a stalwart resident company of actors.” In October 2012, The Pearl celebrated the opening of its first permanent home, located at 555 West 42nd Street. In 2014, Hal Brooks became Artistic Director of the Company.
Box Office Hours: Phone (212) 563-9261
Monday – Friday 11am – 6pm
555 West 42nd Street
(between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York, NY 10036
