Projects
2010
Other projects by Jen Heyes for 2010:
September in the Rain by John Godber, Director/Producer - The Floral Pavilion, New Brighton (website)
Four Corners of the City, Creative Producer - Liverpool Bluecoat (website)
Tales from Haunted Liverpool, adaptation/Director/Co-Producer- Liverpool St Georges Hall (website)
The Spirit of Christmas, Artistic Director - The Royal Philharmonic Hall (website)
2011
Cut to the Chase is to bring the play Widows by Ariel Dorfman with Tony Kushner to Liverpool in the Spring of 2011 for the year of Radical Cities
Ariel Dorfman
Dorfman's works have been translated into more than 40 languages and performed in over 100 countries. Besides poetry, essays and novels— Hard Rain, winner of the Sudamericana Award; Widows; The Last Song of Manuel Sendero; Mascara; Konfidenz; The Nanny and the Iceberg, and Blake’s Therapy—he has written short stories, including My House Is on Fire, and general nonfiction including The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds. He has won various international awards, including two Kennedy Center Theater Awards. In 1996, with his son, Rodrigo, he received an award for best television drama in Britain for Prisoners in Time. His poems, collected in Last Waltz in Santiago and In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land, have been turned into a half-hour fictional film, Deadline, featuring the voices of Emma Thompson, Bono, Harold Pinter, and others
.
Tony Kushner
Kushner's plays and screenplays are often a departure from
typical Realism, experimenting with conventional
storytelling by using shorter episodes. For example, the
Angels in America plays together contain almost 50 scenes.
His condensed, heightened dialogue compacts the action into
impacting, concise bursts. He still proves effective in a
more traditional, "long form" structure; three of the acts
in Perestroika are long, single scenes. He is not afraid of
spectacle - extraordinary moments that stay on target, not
simply for show. Again in Angels, we witness a midnight
appearance from an angel, and a frightening daytime
appearance of a Biblical harbinger of revelation. The play
A Bright Room Called Day, and The Illusion, his 1990
adaptation of Pierre Corneille's L'illusion Comique, are
primarily in verse, showing an almost Shakespearean love of
poetry. Still, his subjects remain current, and, like
Henrik Ibsen, he creates stories that give rise to social
discussion, instead of being simply "issue plays."
