2009-2010 Slate of Shows

The Berzerker!! Theater Arts Competition
7:00 PM, Friday, October 9, 2009
Cash Prizes for the best performed monologues, scenes, and audition songs!



Fall Play

The Heidi Chronicles
by Wendy Wasserstein
November 19, 20, 21, 2009 - 7 PM
Comedy/Drama
Full Length
3 men, 5 women: 8 total

THE REVIEWS: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Hull-Warriner Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. A significant and celebrated play, which was first presented by Off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons and went on to become a long-run Broadway success. Funny, touching, and written with rare grace and sensitivity, the play is a moving examination of the progress of a generation, from the socially and politically activist sixties to the success-oriented eighties—a time during which the status of American women underwent profound, and sometimes unsettling, change. "…not many plays manage Heidi's feat of inducing almost continuous laughter while forcing the audience to examine its preconceptions…It's the play of the season…" —Variety. "…witty, hilarious…not just a funny play, but a wise one…I doubt we'll see a better play this season." —NY Daily News. "…a wonderful and important play." —NY Newsday. "…the writing is emotional and heartfelt, rare qualities in today's trivial theatre, and all the more extraordinary when combined with perceptive characterizations and witty dialogue." —BackStage.

THE STORY: Comprised of a series of interrelated scenes, the play traces the coming of age of Heidi Holland, a successful art historian, as she tries to find her bearings in a rapidly changing world. Gradually distancing herself from her friends, she watches them move from the idealism and political radicalism of their college years through militant feminism and, eventually, back to the materialism that they had sought to reject in the first place. Heidi's own path to maturity involves an affair with the glib, arrogant Scoop Rosenbaum, a womanizing lawyer/publisher who eventually marries for money and position; a deeper but even more troubling relationship with a charming, witty young pediatrician, Peter Patrone, who turns out to be gay; and increasingly disturbing contacts with the other women, now much changed, who were a part of her childhood and college years. Eventually Heidi comes to accept the fact that liberation can be achieved only if one is true to oneself, with goals that come out of need rather than circumstance. She finds a sense of fulfillment that will elude the others of her self-centered generation.


Festival One-Act

Who?
by Michael Scanlon
Feb. 25, 2010 7:00P.M. at Wareham H.S.
Feb. 27, 2010 Time and Place To Be Determined
Drama
One Act
2m / 4f / 10 extras: 16 total

THE STORY: This is a devastating play, an honest play about a teen-age boy who chooses to adopt a new name, a new identity. Geoffrey won't do; Zach is the name for him. Neither his mother, his teacher, nor even his girlfriend approve. It lacks dignity; it lacks strength; but Zach desperately needs to be his own person. Finally, he promises his mother to give up the new name if only she will let him go to The Who concert in Cincinnati. He is only trying to establish his identity instead of his mother’s, or his English teacher’s old fashioned ideas of "place". He goes to the now infamous 1978 Who concert in Cincinnati, where the struggle is lost.


Spring Musical

Pump Boys and Dinettes
Music & lyrics by Jim Wann
May 6, 7, 8 2010 - 7PM
Musical
4m/2f / ensemble

THE REVIEWS: "Electricity filled the air ... this weekend as the cast of Pump Boys and Dinettes took to the stage for their ... performance. This energy was freely transferred between the performers and the audience, who sang along and clapped to every song. The result of this exchange was a feeling of immersion within that lost period of American history in which the show is set, when full-service gas stations and diners lined the endless highways that symbolized the limitless hopes and dreams of postwar America. Pump Boys and Dinettes can be thought of as a musical excursion back to this simpler era, which through the passing of time, must now appear even more foreign and exotic than when the show first appeared 20 years ago." -G C Cristo, writing in "Nuvo", Indianapolis' alternative paper.

THE STORY: On Highway 57, somewhere between Frog Level and Smyrna, stands a gas station. Across the blacktop is a roadside eatery called the Double Cupp Diner. The four guys at the station, Jim, Jackson, Eddie and L.M., have been known to do some auto repairs, but only when aided by quantities of time and beer. The Cupp sisters, Prudie and Rhetta, celebrate their home cooking with the same zeal they bring to being neighbourly with the boys. This is their musical tribute to life by the roadside which was a Best Musical Tony nominee in 1982.

MUSICAL NUMBERS: 1. Highway 57 - Company 2. Taking It Slow - Pump Boys 3. Serve Yourself - L.M. 4. Menu Song - Dinettes 5. The Best Man - Prudie 6. Fisherman's Prayer - Pump Boys 7. Catfish - Pump Boys 8. Mamaw - Jim 9. Be Good Or Be Gone - Rhetta 10. Drinkin' Shoes - Company 11. Pump Boys - Pump Boys 12. Mona - Jackson 13. The Night Dolly Parton Was Almost Mine - L.M. 14. Tips - Dinettes 15. Sister - Dinettes 16. Vacation - Rhetta and all 17. No Holds Barred - Company 18. Farmer Tan - L.M. and Dinettes 19. Closing Time - Company