Curio Theatre's DANCING AT LUGHNASA to Open 2/21

Curio Theatre Company continues its season with Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa. This TONY Award winner runs February 13-March 15. Opening night is Friday, February 21 at 8 p.m. All performances run Thursday-Saturday night at 8 p.m. Tickets cost $25-$20. Performances will take place on Curio's Mainstage in the sanctuary space at the Calvary Center for Culture and Community at 4740 Baltimore Ave. Tickets and more information are available at www.curiotheatre.org or by phone at 215-525-1350.

Friel's poetic masterpiece deals with the lives of the five unmarried Mundy sisters who live in Ballybeg Ireland. The play, set in early August, takes place around the festival of Lughnasadh, the Celtic harvest festival. The sisters, Kate, Maggie, Agnes, Rosie and Christina, all unmarried, live in a cottage outside of Ballybeg. The festival and the rituals associated with it awaken the sisters' long buried desires, vanishing dreams, and a last chance at happiness in the summer of 1936.

The cast of the play includes Eric Scotolati as Michael, Jennifer Summerfield as Kate, Trice Baldwin as Maggie, Aetna Gallagher as Agnes, Colleen Hughes as Rose, Isa St. Clair as Chris, Steve Carpenter as Gerry, and Len Kelly as Jack. Gay Carducci directs this piece with Liam Castellan as Assistant Director. Paul Kuhn is designing the set. Tim Martin is designing the lights. Aetna Gallagher is creating the costumes. Colleen Hughes is the creating the choreography. Patrick Lamborn is the sound designer and Beth Johnson is backstage as the Stage Manager.

"We planned a season with emphasis on gender. Dancing with Lughnasa is a memory play. It is a play about hard economic times, deflated dreams, hope, pain, love. It also deals with five adult, in married sisters and their place in the world," said Director Gay Carducci. "To me personally it is mostly a play about change and how change effects us all differently. In this, I find this play to be timeless. All of the themes are themes that will always be present. It is beautiful, lyrical, and touching on so many levels."

This play is loosely based on the lives of Friel's mother and aunts who lived in Glenties, on the west coast of Donegal. Friel won the 1992 TONY Award for Best Play for this piece and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. He is considered to be one of the greatest living English-language dramatists and has been hailed by the English-speaking world as an "Irish Chekhov." His best known works are Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Dancing at Lughnasa. However, he has written more than thirty plays in a six-decade spanning career. Many of those plays have been featured on Broadway. In 1980 Friel co-founded Field Day Theatre Company. Friel is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the British Royal Society of Literature and the Irish Academy of Letters.

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