Friday, September 11,
7.30
Saturday, September 12,
2.00 & 7.30
Stockbridge Theatre
The 2009-2010 season opens with the titillating pairing of The Lover by Harold Pinter and The Problem by A.R. Gurney Jr. Both shows tell stories of the complicated and humorous things husbands and wives do to keep their marriages alive. Pinter’s The Lover is a subtle blending of artful nuance, veiled menace and zany humor, and a wonderful example of why this British playwright was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005. The play explores the repercussions when dull domesticity and sexual fantasy collide. A.R. Gurney’s The Problem is a shrewd, surprising, and hilarious American take on a similar theme.
Directed by Matthew Cahoon and starring Brian Kennedy and Carey Cahoon.
About the Playwrights
Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008) was born in East London was a renowned playwright, director, actor, poet and political activist. He wrote twenty-nine plays including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, twenty-one screenplays including The Servant, The Go-Between and The French Lieutenant's Woman, and directed twenty-seven theatre productions, including James Joyce's Exiles, David Mamet's Oleanna, seven plays by Simon Gray and many of his own plays. In 1999 he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. He received honorary degrees from eighteen universities. In 2005, Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest honor available to any writer in the world. In announcing the award, Horace Engdahl, Chairman of the Swedish Academy, said that Pinter was an artist “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”
A.R. (“Pete”) Gurney was born in 1930 in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Williams College in 1952, served as an officer the Navy, and afterwards attended the Yale School of Drama. For many years, he taught literature at M.I.T., but moved to New York in 1982 to devote more time to writing for the theatre. He has won a fair amount of awards during his career, and is now a member of the Theatre Hall of Fame and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Gurney has been married to his wife Molly for over fifty years. They have four children, and eight grandchildren, and now live in Roxbury, Connecticut and New York City.