Ghostlight Theatricals: Battling Bards & Rock n' Roll Moliere
Last Saturday, people were getting turned away at the door of Stone Soup Theatre out on Stone Way, as the walkways were already filled with the sell-out crowd at the last night of Ghostlight Theatricals's annual "Battle of the Bards" contest. Onstage, a bevy of Ghostlight regulars put on selections from three adaptations (we use the term loosely) of theatre classics. The audience voted (one vote came with the ticket; additional votes could be purchased for $1) on their favorite, which would get produced the next year as their winter show. Last year's winner, Lauren Goldman Marshall's "rock n' roll" adaptation of Moliere's The Misanthrope, opens tonight at Stone Soup (4029 Stone Way; Fri. & Sat. 7:30 p.m., tix $15/$12).
The trio of plays ran the gamut. Sueno, by Jose Rivera, was a pretty traditional take on Life is a Dream by Calderon de la Barca, the master of Spanish Golden Age theatre--a little known and drastically under-appreciated work. A more confusing and dreary seeming piece called Summertime, by Chuck Mee, apparently drew from everything from Shakespeare to Chekhov, but left us deeply unimpressed. And then there was Blinding Pains, the first piece of the night.
We were sort of iffy about it (disclosure: we voted for Sueno), because it was one of those plays that references a bunch of other theatre that non-theatre people just wouldn't get, but it was definitely the funniest (you have to love a character who's named "Tyler Perry's Othello," or "TPO" for short). The conceit: It's a sitcom-style imagining of what happens to Oedipus after he blinds himself and wanders off into the wilderness to die...if he were to wind up in Phoenix running a Greek-Mex fusion restaurant called Oedipus Mex. Puns abound as he tries to date again (his nemesis, and the girlfriend of his love-interest, is Hedda Gabbler, a competitor who runs a chicken-shack called Gabbler's Gobblers).
Blinding Pains won. We'll see how wise the audience's choice was in winter, '10.
