Mamet Fest to Open with OLEANNA and SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO at Fifth Third Bank Theater, 3/22-4/6

Mamet Fest, a play festival celebrating the work of iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet, opens this week, featuring OLEANNA and SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO in repertory at the Fifth Third Bank Theater, The Aronoff Center for the Arts, on Friday and Saturday, March 22nd through April 6th at 7 PM (OLEANNA) and 9:15 PM (SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO).

Mamet Fest focuses on the work of perhaps the most celebrated contemporary American playwright David Mamet. Mamet Fest: Part One includes perhaps Mamet's best known work, OLEANNA (1992). Inspired by the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings, this taut drama explores the gray areas of a relationship between a pre-tenure college Professor and a young female student. It is paired with SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO (1976), a raucous, sometimes bawdy dissection of the relationships of four twenty-somethings, living and loving in a "big city by a lake" during the summer of 1976. It is the play that brought him his first national recognition.

Tickets for OLEANNA are $22, SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO are $18. Student and senior discounts are available. Tickets are available at the Cincinnati Arts Association box office, 650 Walnut Street, Cincinnati, OH, or by phone at (513) 621-2787 or online at http://www.cincinnatiarts.org/tickets_events.

The goal of Mamet Fest is to present a cross section of David Mamet's career, from his early successes to his latest triumphs. Mamet Fest: Part 2 in June will feature SPEED THE PLOW and A LIFE IN THE THEATRE.

A prolific writer, since 2007, David Mamet has had one and sometimes two plays a year produced on the Broadway Stage. Arguably the most celebrated playwright of our time, Mamet has garnered many awards for his work including: Joseph Jefferson Award (1974), Obie Award (1976, 1983), New York Drama Critics Circle Award (1977, 1984), Outer Circle Award (1978), Society of West End Theatre Award (1983), Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1984), Dramatist Guild Award (1984), American Academy Award (1986), and the Tony Award (1987).

David Mamet worked as an actor and director before achieving success as a playwright in 1976 with a trio of Off Broadway plays: The Duck Variations, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and American Buffalo. Other notable plays include: Oleanna, A life in the Theatre, Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed the Plow, and Race. His screenwriting credits include: The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Wag the Dog, Hoffa, Ronin, and Hannibal. Films that he wrote and directed include: The Spanish Prisoner, House of Games, Heist, State and Main, Things Change, and Homicide. Mamet is also the creator and executive producer of the television show The Unit.

Mamet is recognized for his style of writing, referred to by some as "Mamet Speak." Reminiscent of such playwrights as Harold Pinter and Samuel Becket, he uses sparse, clipped dialogue as a naturalistic poetic expression of street jargon. He uses punctuation, italics and quotation marks to highlight particular words and draw attention to his characters' frequent manipulation and deceitful use of language. His characters frequently interrupt one another, their sentences trail off unfinished, and their dialogue overlaps. Moreover, certain expressions and figures of speech are deliberately misrepresented to show that the character is not paying close attention to every detail of his dialogue. Mamet has criticized his (and other writers') tendency to write pretty at the expense of sound logical plots.

Mamet has said, "the point of theatre is to give the audience enjoyment...The theatre does not need more teachers, or more directors; it needs more writers and actors, and both come from the same applicant pool: those who are affronted, bemused, fascinated, or saddened by the infinite variety of human interaction, which always bodes so promising and usually ends so ill."

Mamet Fest will feature N.K.U. standouts Nate Netzley and Mackenzie Durham Smith as Danny Shapiro and Bernard Litko in SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO. Performance artist Amanda Monyhan also returns to the area stage as Joan Webber in SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO.

Additionally, former Ovation Theatre Artistic Director Alana Ghent of Thomas More College Theatre faculty returns to the professional stage as director of OLEANNA.

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