The Guthrie Presents Coward's BRIEF ENCOUNTER

The Guthrie Theater continues its exciting 2009-10 season with Kneehigh Theatre's groundbreaking production of Noël Coward's Brief Encounter, adapted for the stage by Kneehigh Artistic Director Emma Rice. The runaway international hit, which Rice also directs, has played to sold-out audiences in London, San Francisco and, most recently, New York, and brings its jaw-dropping fusion of theater, film and song to Minneapolis for the final stop on its wildly-successful three-city U.S. tour, featuring a slew of celebrated British actors and Kneehigh regulars, including Joseph Alessi (Fred/Albert), Dan Canham (Ensemble), Eddie Jay (Musician), Annette McLaughlin (Myrtle), Stuart McLoughlin (Stanley), Adam Pleeth (Musician), Beverly Rudd (Beryl), Milo Twomey (Alec) and Hannah Yelland (Laura). Brief Encounter begins performances at the Guthrie on February 11, and continues through April 3, 2010.

Single tickets start at $29 and are now on sale through the Guthrie Box Office at 612.377.2224, toll-free 877.44.STAGE, 612.225.6244 (Group Sales) and online at www.guthrietheater.org.

Switching seamlessly between live theater and remade film footage, Brief Encounter takes audiences back to the age of romance and the silver screen. Forbidden passion brews in a 1938 railway station tearoom as a suburban housewife, over a series of stolen afternoons, falls madly in love with a married doctor. The production careens around varying moods of clipped, clenched passion heaving under the middle-class restraint of the duty-bound Alec and Laura, and the wild music-hall exuberance of the slap-and-tickle highjinks of two other clandestine couples among the railway station staff. The lives and loves of the three couples are played out in the train station tearoom as a grand entertainment, using the words (some newly set to original music) and familiar songs of Coward to create a breathtaking, funny and tear-inducing show with live musicians on stage, characters jumping in and out of film screens, and a couple in love floating in mid-air.

Through its many performances, critics have heralded the production as "positively magical" (Variety), "a first-class return to romance" (Daily Telegraph) and "an imaginative feast" (Daily Express), with Associated Press critic Michael Kuchwara remarking that "to reveal any of Rice's delightful, eye-pleasing surprises would spoil much of the fun. Better to just go and let the considerable enchantment of her ingenuity wash over you." The San Francisco Chronicle raved "Every so often a theater piece comes to town that is so brilliantly conceived and executed, so entertaining on every level, that you want everyoNe You love or even like just a bit to see it. Brief Encounter is that kind of experience."

The show is an adaptation of the 1946 film of the same name, directed by David Lean, and based on Still Life, a Noel Coward one-act first seen a decade earlier. Rice has returned to Coward's original play to rediscover elements that were discarded from the legendary film script. With actors dressed as 1930s movie ushers before the start of the show, the transformation continues when the play starts with a large movie screen that is the most prominent element in the scenic design, helping to blur the lines between cinema and theater. The whimsical staging is in service of the emotional truth of the whirlwind romance at the heart of Coward's film and play. Rice speaks to Coward's innate ability to tap into the hearts and minds of his two protagonists: "It is written with such empathy, such observation, and such tender agony. Noël Coward knew what he was writing about. Imagine being gay in the 1930s and you begin to understand Brief Encounter. Imagine the impossibility of expressing the most fundamental of human needs and emotions."

"I love romance and I love folk tales. Brief Encounter has surprisingly embraced both of these passions," says Rice, who is Joint Artistic Director of Kneeghigh, which has made a name for itself in Britain as a leading force in ensemble-generated theater that challenges the boundaries of live performance. "If you boil it down to its most basic level, I think that my work is often about love, the wonder of it and the trouble it can get us into. It asks how one negotiates the emotions and what happens when you break the rules." Rice describes Brief Encounter as "a very grown-up fairy tale," which manifests itself in the fantastical staging and the unique mixture of romance and comedy that permeates the production.

The creative team for the show Neil Murray (Scenic and Costume Designer), Malcolm Rippeth (Lighting Designer), Jon Driscoll and Gemma Carrington (Projection and Film Designers), Stu Barker (Original Music), Simon Baker (Sound Designer), Lyndie Wright (Puppetry Designer), Sarah Wright (Puppetry Trainer), Robin Kewell (Underwater Filming), Sam Jones (Casting Director), Simon Harvey (Assistant Director), Paul Crewes (Producer for Kneehigh Theatre) and Michael Mushalla (General Manager for U.S. Tour).

About Kneehigh Theatre
Kneehigh Theatre is acknowledged as a defining theatrical force in the United Kingdom. With Cornwall as its physical and spiritual home, Kneehigh draws inspiration from the county's landscapes, history, people, and culture. Kneehigh's rehearsal base is a National Trust barn on the cliffs near Mevagissey, and its office is in Truro, the administrative center of Cornwall. Kneehigh takes pride in its Cornish identity. Cornwall has a long and lively history of international trade and cultural exchange. For a county so distant from the capital, it boasts remarkably cosmopolitan and global influences and culture. Kneehigh is proud to be an active part of this tradition.

Kneehigh creates vigorous, popular theater for a broad spectrum of audiences, using a multitalented group of performers, directors, designers, sculptors, engineers, musicians, and writers. Kneehigh employs a wide range of art forms and media as its "tool kit" to make new and accessible forms of theater. A spontaneous sense of risk and adventure produces extraordinary dramatic results. Themes are universal and local, epic and domestic. Kneehigh now tours throughout the United Kingdom and internationally; in the last fiscal year, 120,000 people across three continents saw Kneehigh performances. Recent Kneehigh Theatre productions include Tristan & Yseult, Nights at the Circus (a Lyric Hammersmith production in association with Kneehigh Theatre), Cymbeline (in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company for The Complete Works festival), A Matter of Life and Death (Royal National Theatre production in association with Kneehigh Theatre), Rapunzel (in association with Battersea Arts Centre), Blast!, Brief Encounter (a David Pugh and Dafydd Rogers Production in association with Kneehigh Theatre) and Don John (in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Bristol Old Vic). For more information please visit www.kneehigh.co.uk.

The Guthrie Theater, founded in 1963, is an American center for theater performance, production, education and professional training. The Guthrie is dedicated to producing the great works of dramatic literature, developing the work of contemporary playwrights and cultivating the next generation of theater artists. Led by Director Joe Dowling since 1995, the Guthrie opened its new three-theater home on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis in June 2006.

The Guthrie is located at 818 South 2nd Street (at Chicago Avenue), in downtown Minneapolis. To purchase tickets or season subscriptions call the Guthrie Box Office at 612.377.2224 or toll-free 877.44.STAGE. For more information, or to purchase tickets online, visit www.guthrietheater.org.

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