Illusion Theater’s 2011 Lights Up! Series Presents LE MISANTHROPE 1/20-23

The Illusion Theater's Light House Group presents a new version of Molière's Le Misanthrope to lighten and brighten up Minnesota's dark days of winter. Adapted and directed by Eric Powell Holm, The Misanthrope, or the Impossible Lovers is the story of a couple whose passion is unparalleled, but whose personalities are always at odds. The sixth annual Lights Up! production is on stage at the Illusion, 528 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, January 20-23, 2011.

The Misanthrope, or the Impossible Lovers (based on the full French title, Le Misanthrope ou l'Atrabilaire Amoureux) is a swift, no-holds-barred rendition, created and performed with only four actors. This clever reworking lifts the veil off Molière's masterpiece where the hopeless couple locks horns in one of literature's funniest breakups; a play that, along with Shakespeare's works, helped invent the modern romantic comedy.

Over the course of one drunken fateful night, young lovers Alceste and Celimene, both unbending in complex and distinct ways, search for some compromise that will save their faltering relationship, but they're beset on all sides by well-meaning friends, potential lovers, sabotaging enemies and their own resolute natures.

Holm's Misanthrope aims to celebrate Molière's style of rhyming couplets and strict poetic meter, while indulging in a decadent and chaotic environment. Breana Jarvis and BrenDan Frost star as the impossible lovers with Isabel K. Nelson and Matt "Sass" Spring taking on the six other characters.

His adaptation premiered to critical acclaim in 2009 with the Vintage Theater Collective in Chicago, where Chicago Tribune reviewer Kerry Reid said, "I was bowled over by Eric Powell Holm's savvy, imaginative and wholly American take...sparkling staging [and] quicksilver comic timing...It's stripped down, it's taut and it delivers a much bigger wallop than expected."

"I am very excited to be working with Eric Holm and his company of young actors on this year's Lights Up! program," said the Light House Group's Founder and Producing Director Ellen Fenster. "I love Eric's knowledge of and passion for the classics and the way he twists them for a modern audience. This adaptation is really fresh and flirty while staying true to the feel of the original."

Tickets for the Lights Up! program are $15 and are now on sale at the Illusion Theater Box Office at 612-339-4944 or online at www.illusiontheater.org.

The theater is located on the 8th floor in the Hennepin Center for The Arts at 528 Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis.

 

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