Theatre Company Lafayette presents 'Absurd Person Singular'

THEATER COMPANY OF LAFAYETTE TO PRESENT Alan Ayckbourn'S ABSURD PERSON SINGULAR

Theater Company of Lafayette (TCL) continues its 2009-2010 season, performing Absurd Person Singular, the dark comedy by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, from April 24 to May 16. Public relations and audience development activities for the play are being conducted under a pilot program in collaboration with the Boulder County Arts Alliance (BCAA) and Louisville's Coal Creek Community Theater.

Having written more than 70 plays, literally dozens of which are being produced on any given day, Ayckbourn is one of the most prolific and widely performed playwrights in the history of the English language.

Absurd Person Singular Director Jackie Tisinai also directed TCL's well received March, 2007 production of Ayckbourn's Woman In Mind. Says Tisinai, "Ayckbourn wrote Absurd Person in 1972 as a commentary on the division of social classes and how quickly people can rise or fall. But it speaks to us just as strongly more than 30 years later. It's a play about the wasteland of middle-class sensibility. There's nothing dated about that!"

In 1990, eighteen years after the work was first performed, Aycknourn commented, "It was originally intended as a slightly veiled attack on the get-rich-quick society which has got even worse since then. It seems even more relevant today than it did when I first wrote it."

Absurd Person Singular is set over three Christmases in the kitchens of three couples: Sidney Hopcroft, an ambitious tradesman, and his submissive wife Jane; architect and adulterer Geoffrey Jackson and his depressed wife, Eva; Ronald Brewster-Wright, a banker, and his alcoholic wife Marion.

The show runs Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. from April 24 through May 16, with Sunday matinees May 3 and 10 at 2 p.m.

Tickets are $10-$15 and are available by calling the Box Office at 720-209-2154 or online at the TCL website, www.TCLStage.org.

All performances are at the historic Mary Miller Theater, 300 E. Simpson Street, Lafayette.

BCAA conducts seminars in public relations and audience development as part of its Business of the Arts program. Representatives from TCL have been attending those seminars regularly, and Absurd Person Singular will be a pilot for use of several of the techniques learned, including actor and director talkback sessions, expanded use of posters and flyers, cooperative advertising and ticket price reduction coupons with Coal Creek Community Theater, and specialized fundraising for a campaign to replace TCL's outdated lighting system. TCL, Coal Creek and BCAA are discussing the possibility of expanding the collaboration in the future and of inviting additional theaters to take part.