BWW Blog: BURBAGE THEATRE COMPANY

BroadwayWorld Rhode Island readers nominated four area companies as "Rising Stars/Theaters to Watch" during the 2015 Regional BroadwayWorld Awards. Now, in a four-part series, the artistic directors from each theater join BWW RI as guest bloggers, sharing their creative vision and inspiration in their own words. Next up is Jeff Church, the founding Artistic Director of the Burbage Theatre Company in Providence, RI.

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Richard Burbage, the namesake of our company, was the leading player of The Lord Chamberlain's Men, the same company that first produced the major works of William Shakespeare. Burbage led the ensemble of actors that first played Shakespeare's great stories, with nothing but a bare stage beneath them.

A truly great responsibility.

The Burbage Theatre Company is an ensemble of actors who want to tell you stories.

Stories that you've never heard before. Perspectives you may never have considered. And maybe some stories that illuminate one of the dark, unarticulated corners of your mind.

And, like Richard Burbage, all we need is an ensemble of actors and an audience. This relationship between player and spectator, unadorned and stark, is what makes and has always made the theatre a unique form of expression and a necessary cultural institution. So we've made it our backbone.

The results are varied; maybe there's a touch of hilarity, often there is a dash of the absurd, and undoubtedly a bit of irreverence. But every night, our audience forgets that they are watching a play. A fiction. They commit to an act of fully realized truth, conveyed by the strength, immediacy, and vulnerability of an expert ensemble of actors.

Burbage started as a group of college students who wanted more than was offered by the undergraduate setting, so we produced our own work. Over time our limited resources rendered our productions entirely reliant on our own abilities as actors and directors. Our actors have worked at just about every theatre in this state, and as far away as Boston, Maine, New York City, and California.

After years of producing and performing on the fringe, Burbage has landed in downtown Providence at Aurora, the former home of Black Rep Theatre, 276 Westminster Street. This past summer we produced a series of two plays at Aurora entitled "Loving the Ghost" (Red Light Winter by Adam Rapp and Love Song by John Kolvenbach).

Our current play series is a perfect example of what we do at Burbage. "This Winter's War" is a series of two plays that we are producing at Aurora. And both of these plays are built up around the strongest ensembles of actors that we've ever collaborated with.

War is the thru-line in these plays. It is hard these days to imagine a world without war. Something like nine out of ten people believe that war will never end, that humans will always, in some way or other, be at war with each other. In an election season, we at Burbage feel it pertinent to hone in on the perpetual nature of war, and find, in a time of transition, why the next war begins.

Our first production of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Happy Birthday, Wanda June ended its sold out run on February 5.

Titus Andronicus is our current and final production in this series, a beautifully violent work by William Shakespeare and the most popular play he wrote in his day.

Be warned: Titus Andronicus not a play for the faint of heart. Steeped in the Senecan tradition that permeated the Elizabethan stage, Titus famously depicts the violence that revenge begets. But this play is so much deeper than its body count. Titus is about the commonplace cruelty, pain, and prejudice that we exhibit and experience when living in a perpetual state of war. It is about the blurred line between justice and revenge, and the kind of manic mirth that stems from the latter. It is about the effects of violence on the mind and our human capacity to endure the inexplicable; atrocities against the state, against family, against women, against those of different cultures and different beliefs. It is also about humor's ability to diffuse even the most dire of circumstances.

These are not outdated themes. Quite the contrary. In a time where we have been desensitized to the barbarism in our modern world, we at Burbage want to put you in the room with it. Our challenge to you: We want you to see the effects of the violence you benignly hear about through your television screens, and experience a world that you might otherwise casually dismiss.

Synopsis: Titus Andronicus returns to Rome after years at war and is expected to become emperor. He refuses the throne, but in doing so sets into motion a gruesome chain of events. Tamora, queen of his defeated enemies, marries the new emperor. She and her sons vow revenge against Titus and carry out a campaign of gore and cruelty which decimates the Andronicus family. Devastated and dishonored, Titus enacts his own sinister vengeance against the royal family in what is perhaps Shakespeare's most violent play.

We promise that, when you leave our theatre, you will leave thinking and considering ideas and images that you may never forget.

Visit www.burbagetheatre.org or e-mail info@burbagetheatre.org for more information, or contact boxoffice@burbagetheater.org to reserve tickets. Burbage Theatre Company at Aurora Providence, 276 Westminster Street, Providence, RI.

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