Everyman Closes Season with BLACKBIRD May 12-June 13

Everyman Theatre's Baltimore will close the 09/10 season with the premiere of Blackbird, Examines the Boundaries of Love, May 12 through June 13.  Blackbird, a haunting, powerful drama that has left London and New York audiences breathless. The Baltimore premiere directed by Derek Goldman will star Everyman Resident Company member Megan Anderson and David Parkes in his Everyman debut.  For tickets call the Everyman Theatre Box Office at 410.752.2208 or online at www.everymantheatre.org.

Blackbird received Britain's highest theatrical honor, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play, and was named one of The New York Times' Top Ten plays of 2007. Director Derek Goldman, Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center and Associate professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Georgetown, will be making his Everyman directorial debut for this production.One of the most talked about plays to come out of London in years, this powerful, volatile piecebegins when Una shows up unexpectedly at the office of Ray, forcing him to come to terms with theeffects of their relationship. Una pulls Ray into an encounter that is gripping, surprising and utterlyunforgettable - the ultimate taboo.Everyman Founding Artistic Director Vincent Lancisi said: "For the first time ever, I watched the design run without making a single note. I wrote Blackbird on the top of my paper, put my pen down,and didn't pick it up once the entire run. I was completely enthralled. We have the perfect combination of actors and director for this production. The audience is going to be so shocked and stunned. Shocks are flying."Blackbird runs May 12th through June 13th, offering performancesTuesday through Sunday. Everyman Theatre is a professional Equity theatre company with a resident ensemble of artists from the Baltimore/DC area dedicated to presenting high quality plays that are affordable and accessible to everyone. For tickets call the Everyman Theatre Box Office at 410.752.2208 or online at www.everymantheatre.org.

David Harrower who was born in Edinburgh in 1966, is one of the most successful playwrights among the burgeoning number of talenTEd Scottish writers to have emerged in the past decade. He doesn't take his rapid rise to fame for granted. From his less than propitious beginnings, Harrower himself is in awe of the path his career has taken. He dropped out of college and worked at menial jobs for a while. To quote his own words when asked ifHarold Pinter was one of his role models: "I came to theatre quite late. I wrote short stories.... as I waswashing dishes in a restaurant and doing these cruddy jobs, and as I was writing the stories I found I couldn'tbe bothered writing the descriptive stuff, so they just came out with the dialogue. And this was before Idiscovered Pinter, but I was thinking about whatlanguage could be used to do... how it could be used to hide things as well as reveal things. I didn't go to theatre much. I had never shown much interest in it before, but I went to the library and I started reading... Some of the early stuff that really got hold of me was Brian Friel's plays."And herein lies a remarkable story of the driving force of talent. David Harrower became a self-taught scholar.  Living on his welfare check, he spent the next two years in the library eight hours a day, and with a disciplineimposed by a will of iron, he devoured all the material he could find dealing with every aspect of theatre; its history, its impact on society and the playwrights who told the story.In 1995, at the age of 27, he submitted his first play, Knives in Hens to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre where itpremiered and enjoyed both critical and popularsuccess. It went on to be translated for production in more than 20 countries and ran in Germany for aboutthree years. In trying to explain its success, Harrower said, "It's something to do with... the fact of creatinglanguage to convey your thoughts, to convey yourfeelings about the world.....it really burrowed into why we used language, what we need it for, and it did get an extraordinary response from people."But he has not confined himself only to the writing of original plays. Harrower has adapted the works of manygreat writers such as Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, von Horwath's Tales From the Vienna Woods, Buchner's Woyzeck, and Chekhov's Ivanov. In discussing with him why he writes as he does and why he enjoys making adaptations of otherauthors' plays, there is a recurring theme in Harrower's motivation: the use of language to convey ones'thoughts and feelings about the world at the time in which each playwright is living. As he says ofChekhov's Ivanov "It's a thrill just to steep yourself not only in the play itself but the time that the writer wasworking in. I'm just fascinated by playwrights and why people would choose to use this form". David Harrower is now a leading name in theatre and his works are being performed around the world. Awards 1997 - Theater Heute Best Foreign Play (Critics Award) Germany; 1998-BBC Radio 4, 54%ACRYLIC-nominated for Sony Radio Award; 1999-original play KILL THE OLD,TORTURE THEIR YOUNG-the Meyer Whitworth Prize.

David Harrower came across a newspaper story about a 31 year- old former US Marine who, over a number of months, had an internet correspondence with a British girl. When they disappeared together an alarm went out because the girl was a minor. The ex-Marine was arrested in Germany. The girl was flown back to Britain to be reunited with her family. The man ultimately spent close to 11 years in prison for child abuse, first in Britain and then in the US.  However, it was not the actual story that piqued Harrower's imagination but rather, the concept of the aftermath on each of their lives in the years thatfollowed; the struggle over the memory of what had happened between them. As Harrower says in speaking for himself, "for me, it's what we carry within us, how we believe we are madeup and what memories we hold on to that shape us. It's what makes us the people we are. We walk around atany given moment, the sum of what we carry with us. I wanted that tension between the memory or the picturethey paint for themselves and what is possible for them now."The play offers no solutions; there are no black and white conclusions to be drawn. Each of us must deal with the ambiguities Harrower leaves unresolved for himself as well as his audience. But what stands out is theimpact of the writing, the terse reality of the dialogue as the telling of the fallout from the original encounter unfolds and above all, the level and degree ofdiscussion the play has generated among audiences universally as it was produced in Japan, Mexico, Australia, France, Sweden and India, to name a few.Harrower is always asked where the title came from. Was it the use of the Scottish slang of 'blackbird' for'jailbird' or the tale of St. Vincent and the blackbirds? Harrower says he wishes he had thought of those things but it was actually quite simple: he had to find a title in a hurry and while he was working on the script he happened to be listening to an improvisation on the song 'Bye, bye Blackbird'. On the spur of the moment itoccurred to him that there was an improvisationalquality to the dialogue he was writing and so the title was born.Production History2005-commissioned and presented by the Edinburgh International Festival2006-Albery Theatre West End London2007-Manhattan Theatre Club New York2007-West Coast premier at The American Conservatory Theatre (A.C.T.)Awards 2006-Scotland Critic Award for Best Play2007-Laurence Olivier Award
 
Derek Goldman, Director; Jim Frouchard, Scenic Designer; Matthew Miller, Lighting Designer; Gail Beach, Costume Designer; Elisheba Ittoop; Sound Designer, Lewis Shaw; Fight Choreographer, Amanda Hall; Stage Manager, Naomi Greenberg-Slovin; Dramaturg. Cast Bios:Megan Anderson (Una) Everyman Theatre: The Exonerated (Sue, Sandra), Rabbit Hole (Izzy), The Cherry Orchard (Varya), Filthy Rich (Susan Scott), Turn of the Screw (The Woman), Much Ado About Nothing (Hero), And a Nightingale Sang (Joyce), The School for Scandal (Lady Teazle), TheCripple of Inishmaan (Helen, Greater Baltimore Theatre Award), Proof (Catherine, Greater Baltimore Theatre Award) Taking Sides (Emmi Straub), My Children! My Africa! (Isabel, BaltimoreCity Paper-Best Actress), The Crucible (Abigail), The 5thof July (Shirley), The Last Night of Ballyhoo (Sunny). Regional: Olney Theatre Center, Rabbit Hole (Helen Hayes, nominated for Outstanding Ensemble); Rep Stage, The Violet Hour (Rosamund Plynth), The Seagull (Nina, HelenHayes Nomination); Round House Theatre, Heartbreak House (Ellie Dunn), The Cherry Orchard(Anya), Our Town (Emily), Problem Child (Denise); Woolly Mammoth, The Faculty Room (Zoe); Totem Pole Playhouse, Proposals (Josie), Crimes of the Heart (Babe), Proof (Catherine); LA Theatreworks/Voice of America, Bus Stop (Elma). TV/Film: 3 seasons on The Wire (Jennifer Carcetti); Hit and Run (Jane) (Lionsgate/MGM). Teaching: Everyman Theatre, Scene Shop forYoung Actors and the Summer Intensive. Other: Member Everyman Theatre Resident ActingCompany; Audition Coach.David Parkes (Ray) Everyman Theatre: Debut. New York: Lee Strasberg Institute, Vineyard Theatre, Westbank Theatre. Regional: TimeLine Theatre, Hannah and Martin (Martin Heidegger, After Dark Award), The Crucible (John Proctor, After Dark Award), A Man for All Seasons (Thomas Moore), The General from America (George Washington), Pravda (Lambert LaRue), The Lion in Winter (Henry II), Awake and Sing (Moe Axlerod), Not About Nightingales (Warden Whalen, JosephJefferson Citation); Steppenwolf Theatre, One Arm; American Theatre Company, Apple TreeTheatre, Eclipse, Footsteps, greasy joan, Northlight, Streetsigns, Piven Theatre Workshop, CincinnatiPlayhouse in the Park, Asolo Theatre. National Tours: Romeo & Juliet (Romeo), A Midsummer Nights' Dream (Lysander). TV/Film: Patrick Swayze's The Beast. Education: BFA, New YorkUniversity; MFA, Florida State University; exchange program with the Moscow Art Theatre, Russia. Other: Member of TimeLine Theatre Company.

Director Derek Goldman is honored to be working at Everyman for the first time. He is Artistic Director of the Davis Performing Arts Center and Associate Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Georgetown University, as well as Founding Artistic Director of the StreetSigns Center for Literatureand Performance, an award-winning socially-engaged professional theatre founded in Chicago, devoted to new adaptations of literature for the stage, re-imagined classics, and ensemble-devised performance. Under Goldman's leadership, the company was named by the Chicago Sun-Times as "the most exciting company to emerge in Chicago since John Cusack's New Criminals"; by the NewYork Times as "one of Chicago's top theater companies"; and, after the company's move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by The Spectator as "the region's leading producer of cutting-edge work." In addition to having led the company for 15 years through more than 60 productions, he has directed Off-Broadway, internationally, and worked regularly as a director and adapter/playwright with leading regional theaters across the country. He is the author of more than 20 professionally produced plays and adaptations, including work published by Samuel French, and he has directed over 50 productions. Recent projects include his adaptations of Lysistrata and Kafka's Metamorphosis (currently running) at Synetic Theater; In Darfur at Theater J and Theodore Bikel's Sholom Aleichem:Laughter through Tears, which is touring after hit runs in DC and with the National Jewish Theater/Folksbeine in New York; Eurydice at Round House Theater; As You Like It at the Folger Theater; his adaptation of Studs Terkel's Will the Circle Be Unbroken at Steppenwolf (with David Schwimmer), at Millennium Park in Chicago (with Garrison Keillor) and in North Carolinaand DC (with David Strathairn), as well as extensive new work development with Lincoln Center, theKennedy Center, Arena Stage, and many others. Among his published/produced plays andadaptations are Haymarket Eight, which premiered at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago; Right as Rain, a new play about Anne Frank and the Holocaust that toured nationally for 3 years; and numerous award-winning adaptations, all of which he also staged, including A Death in theFamily (Joseph Jefferson Citation for Best New Work/Adaptation), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Independent Award for Best of the Decade 2000-2009), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kaddish for Allen Ginsberg, The Turn of the Screw, Divine Days, a new adaptation of Six Characters in Search of an Author, and others. Other directing highlights include his Jeff Award-winning Hamlet, The Seagull, the US Premiere of Helene Cixous' epic The Perjured City, DeLillo's Mao II, Brecht's Antigone, Lorca's The Public, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Tales of theLost Formicans, Chicago's long-running comic hit Night of the Mime, the off-Broadway and internationally touring hit Sholom Aleichem- Now You're Talking, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, The Skin of Our Teeth, Our Town, the DC Premiere of Stuff Happens, and others. He received his Ph. D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.

Blackbird by David Harrower and directed by Derek Goldman will run May 12 - June 13, 2010 at Everyman Theatre, 1727 N Charles St, Baltimore.  Blackbird is a gripping, surprising and utterly unforgettable piece about the boundaries of love.  Tickets: 410.752.2208 or www.everyman.theatre.org.  Pay-What-You-Can tickets are available for May 11th and can be purchased in person at the Everyman Theatre Box Office, 1727 N Charles Street. Call 410.752.2208 or visit www.everymantheatre.org for details.  Post-show Talk Back Discussion: June 10th A post-show Talk Back with the play's actors and designers will be held Thursday, June 10th. For tickets call the Box Office at 410.752.2208 or online at www.everymantheatre.org.  Opening Night: Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 8pmMingle with the cast, crew, and staff at a lively post-show cast reception. For tickets, call 443.752.2208 or visit online at www.everymantheatre.org.

 

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