Skidmore Theater to Stage FRAGMENTS as Spring 2017 Black Box Show

Saratoga Springs, NY - The Skidmore College Department of Theater has announced its spring Black Box production, Fragments by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Albee. In the year of this renowned playwright's passing, director Shea Leavis '17 brings one of his rarely produced plays to life.

Synopsis: In Fragments, a group of eight people gather together and begin reading aloud a series of proverbs. These proverbs provoke those assembled to begin telling us stories: stories from the past, of dreams, of identity, and those that question the most fundamental parts of existence. As the playwright Edward Albee says, "The piece proceeds as a piece of music does." Words build, scatter, and explode in rhythm. They serve as an examination of the human search for meaning in life, and the struggle to connect to the world and to one another through storytelling.

From the director: "Edward Albee was a writer who throughout his artistic life ceaselessly challenged the audience to live their lives to the fullest and meticulously examine how they behave and treat one another. As a theater artist and playwright he always provoked the limits of what could be talked about onstage and the forms in which it could be done. By discussing politics, death rituals, racial profiling, childhood nightmares, and domestic violence, Fragments is a piece that searches for significance in the strangeness of everyday life and magnifies the importance of how people struggle to communicate with one another in an increasingly fractured world. This play is being presented not necessarily to hold a mirror up to society for reflection, but to serve as a proposal for how our reality might look, sound and feel if we abandoned assumptions about how things should be and simply took a moment to exist with one another. In Albee's universe even the small act of sharing stories is something the human body relies on for survival and nourishment as heavily as it does the air we breathe." -Shea Leavis '17

Tickets: $12 general admission and $8 for students and senior citizens. To reserve seats, call the Skidmore Theater Box Office at (518) 580-5439, email boxoffice@skidmore.edu or find us online at theater.skidmore.edu or on Facebook.