Tarragon and Volcano Theatres to Premiere Hannah Moscovitch's INFINITY Next Month

By: Mar. 03, 2015
Enter Your Email to Unlock This Article

Plus, get the best of BroadwayWorld delivered to your inbox, and unlimited access to our editorial content across the globe.




Existing user? Just click login.

Tarragon Theatre and Volcano Theatre proudly present their co-production of the world premiere of Infinity, written by one of Canada's most prolific and acclaimed writers, 2014 Trillium Award winner and a Tarragon playwright-in-residence, Hannah Moscovitch. A shocking, funny and revelatory elegy to time and love, Infinity opens Wednesday April 1 and runs to Sunday May 3 (previewing from March 25) in Tarragon's Extraspace, directed by Volcano's Artistic Director Ross Manson.

"What is time? Everything we think, feel, or do reminds us of its existence." - Lee Smolin, Time Reborn

How does a new Theory of Time change everything we know about ourselves? A brilliant young woman and her parents smash together like particles colliding in an accelerator. Her father is a theoretical physicist and her mother a composer; she is a mathematician. Together, they learn that love and time are connected in ways they couldn't have imagined.

A terrific cast stars in this intricate drama: Paul Braunstein (Tarragon's Kilt - Dora nomination, Volcano's Goodness, VideoCabaret's Laurier) portrays the father, Elliot; Haley McGee (solo show OH MY IRMA presented by Theatre Passe Muraille which she later took on an international tour, Theatre Columbus' The Story) is the daughter, Sarah Jean; and Amy Rutherford (Volcano's A Beautiful View and Goodness - national tour and New York, Edinburgh, Rwanda; Studio 180's Our Class, Necessary Angel's Divisadero) is the mother, Carmen. The violinist is Andréa Tyniec (performed as a soloist with l'Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw and Calgary Symphony among others, 1st Prize at Italy's Andrea Postacchini International Violin Competition 2008).

Infinity is infused with theoretical physics, classical music and the idea that what time offers us is more than we realize. Infinity has been crafted with close input from world-renowned physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and internationally acclaimed Toronto-based composer Njo Kong Kie (music director of Montreal's contemporary dance company La La La Human Steps, now dividing his time between Toronto and Macau).

Says Moscovitch about Infinity: "Ross Manson commissioned me to write about time; we both read Lee Smolin's book Time Reborn and were inspired by it. We reached out to him and he became the consulting theoretical physicist. One of the great pleasures of working on this project has been working with Lee. It is his physics - his theories - that inspired the physics in Infinity; he wrote us a backstory for the main character Elliot, and has written some of the physics text that's in the play. I write about love a lot, and what the limits of love are, and how love can be dangerous. Infinity is also packed with those themes. Another of the themes is about what philosophies and systems of thought are communicated down the generations. I'm thinking about that a lot because I'm starting a family."

Nationally renowned, Hannah Moscovitch is considered one of the strongest playwriting voices in Canada. Her work has won multiple awards. She is the first playwright to win the Trillium Book Award in the prize's twenty-seven year history for This is War, a play premiered by Tarragon in 2013 which also won the Toronto Critic's Award for Best New Canadian Play and toured to Winnipeg's Prairie Theatre Exchange. Her first full-length play, East of Berlin, premiered at Tarragon in 2007. Tarragon also produced a mini-festival of her work in 2013 that included the premieres of Little One and Other People's Children as well as a remount of Roseneath Theatre's In This World.

Moscovitch's other writing for the stage includes What a Young Wife Ought to Know (premiered last month by Halifax's Neptune and 2b theatre company), The Children's Republic (Great Canadian Theatre Company premiere) and The Huron Bride (premiered as part of Theatrefront's The Mill play cycle) as well as The Russian Play and Essay, both of which won awards at SummerWorks Performance Festival. She's been nominated for the Governor General's Award, the Siminovitch Prize and the international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Upcoming, she is writing a combination of TV, opera, theatre, and film projects, including commissions with the Stratford and Shaw Festivals. She is a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre in Toronto.

Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist who is engaged in a lifelong search for the quantum theory of space and time. Born in New York City, and educated at Hampshire College and Harvard University, he moved to Canada in 2001 to be a founding faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. The author of 180 research papers, his last two books are Time Reborn (2013) and, co-authored with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time (2015).

Ross Manson is an award-winning director, an actor, a translator, and the founding artistic director of Volcano Theatre, an internationally acclaimed, independent, concept-driven theatre company based in Toronto, characterized by formal experimentation, risk-taking and multi-disciplinarity. Since 1993, Manson has directed over twenty shows which have toured to three continents, and won or been nominated for over fifty local, national and international awards. These include The Golden Dragon by Roland Schimmelpfennig (for Tarragon); A Synonym for Love (a site-specific re-imagining of a Handel Opera); Another Africa (a three-continent collaboration for Volcano); Goodness by Michael Redhill (Volcano); The Four Horsemen Project (Volcano); A Beautiful View by Daniel MacIvor (BeMe theatre, Munich), and dramaturgy for White Rabbit Red Rabbit, a play by Iranian Nassim Soleimanpour which has played in over 15 languages around the world since its premiere with Volcano in Edinburgh and Toronto in 2011. Awards include Dora Awards as a director, playmaker and producer; the Scotsman Fringe First Award, the Best of Edinburgh Award, and the KM Hunter Award (Ontario), among several others. Manson trained initially as a biologist (BSc Mount Allison) and subsequently as a theatre artist (MA London, directing apprenticeship, Germany).

The talented creative team also includes set and costume designer Teresa Pryzybylski, lighting designer Rebecca Picherack and choreographer Kate Alton. The stage manager is Isabelle Ly.

INFINITY opens April 1 and runs to May 3, 2015 (previews from March 25) at Tarragon Theatre's Extraspace, 30 Bridgman Avenue, Toronto, M5R 1X3, playing Tuesday-Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 2:30pm and select Saturdays at 2:30pm: April 4, April 11, April 18.

Regular Tickets: $50-$55; Previews: $27 (Discounts for seniors, students, arts workers and groups). Tickets can be purchased through Patron Services at 416.531.1827 or by visiting www.tarragontheatre.com. Rush Tickets: For every performance excluding opening night, specially priced $15 Rush Tickets will be sold (subject to availability) in person at the Box Office two hours before show time. Follow Tarragon on Twitter @TarragonTheatre for updates on rush ticket availability and special ticket offers.



Videos