Photo Flash: Kitchen Theatre's HEROES Begins Tonight

Kitchen Theatre Company opens its 23rd Season with Tom Stoppard's award-winning translation of HEROES, a comedy by French playwright Gérald Sibleyras. Winner of the prestigious Olivier Award for Best New Comedy, HEROES begins previews tonight, September 4th. Opening night is September 7th, and the play runs through September 22nd. BroadwayWorld has a sneak peek at the cast onstage below!

Today's baby boomers generally expect to continue to explore life's opportunities after they stop working; retirement is a chance to fill one's life with new adventures. In contrast, Gustave, Philippe and Henri, the three WWI heroes of the play, are now confined to a veterans' home in rural France in 1959 and have a much-reduced view of what is in store for the last miles of their life's journeys. They live under the tyrannical hand of Sister Madeline, who believes that a combination of strict rules and daily celebrations of residents' birthdays-mixed with almost as many funerals-is the best way to live one's last days. Intrepid lifelong soldiers, they support each other in a rebellion against authority and hatch a plan to escape. They may go to Indochina, or perhaps just to the stand of poplars that sway like sirens on a nearby hill, but they need to find an alternative to the unbearable tedium of their daily lives.

Margarett Perry, (The Motherf**ker with the Hat, Private Lives, Call Me Waldo, Mrs. Mannerly, among many others) directs this delightful and heartbreakingly funny play that looks at how we cope and maintain hope. Kitchen Theatre Artistic Director Rachel Lampert says, "I love these three characters. They have a never-say-die spirit that makes me take notice of how we choose to live our lives. I am thrilled to have Margarett Perry get our season started. We have an extraordinarily wonderful cast, and Kent Goetz's set design is so inviting, I want to move in!"

The cast includes two newcomers to the Kitchen Theatre Company and the return of KTC veteran Eric Brooks. Eric Brooks (AEA) previously appeared at the Kitchen in The Price, Precious Nonsense, The Unexpected Man, Talley's Folly, Iron, Between East and West, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, & Six Apparitions of Lenin Appear on the Piano. Regional credits include the Loretto-Hilton Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, and the Meadow Brook Theatre in Detroit. He also spent several years as Dr. Louis Darnell on the long-running soap opera, Guiding Light.

New to the Kitchen is Evan Thompson (AEA) whose Broadway appearances include Ivanov, City of Angels, 1776 among others; regional productions at Arena Stage, Dorset Theater Festival, Ford's Theater among others and in NYC at Cherry Lane, Second Stage, NY Shakespeare Festival, Queens Theater in the Park, Primary Stages and more. Completing the cast is Arthur Bicknell, who has returned to his native Ithaca and serves as the Literary Manager of Homecoming Players. He appeared locally last season in Theater Incognita's Our Town. Arthur Bicknell has been an actor, playwright and theatrical agent.

Longtime Kitchen Theatre Company designers include Kent Goetz, set design, Tyler M. Perry, light design and Lisa Boquist, costume design. New to the Kitchen is Anthony Mattana, who will do the sound design.

In conjunction with the Ithaca premiere of Heroes, the Kitchen Theatre Company will present a number of ancillary events: free pre-show discussions with local experts on issues related to the play and post-show talk backs with the cast and Artistic Director. Pre-show talks are scheduled for Thursday, September 12th and Thursday, September 19th, and talkbacks are scheduled for Friday, September 13th and Friday, September 20th. Please check our website for more events: www.kitchentheatre.org.

Kitchen Theatre Company (KTC), beginning its 23rd season, is downtown Ithaca's critically acclaimed and nationally recognized year-round professional theater company, specializing in regional and world premiere plays and musicals. KTC's intimate 99-seat theater is in its newly renovated, LEED-certified building in the West End neighborhood of downtown Ithaca, New York. KTC is the first not-for-profit recipient of the David R. Strong Memorial "Small Business of the Year" Award from the Tompkins County Chamber of Commerce and receives public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the Tompkins County Tourism Program. The Kitchen Theatre Company also receives general operating support from the Shubert Foundation.

Photo Credit: Dave Burbank

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