Pontine Theatre Opens 40th Season with T. S. Eliot's FOUR QUARTETS

Pontine Theatre opens its 40th Season with a solo staging of T. S. Eliot's FOUR QUARTETS performed by John Farrell. Mr. Farrell is the founding co-director of Portland Maine's celebrated Figures of Speech Theater. Performances are: Friday 3 November at 7pm; Saturday 4 November at 4pm; and Sunday 5 November at 2pm. Tickets are $24 and may be purchased online at www.pontine.org. Tickets may also be purchased at the door a half-hour prior to each performance, based on availability. The performance takes place at the Newington Old Town Hall, located at 336 Nimble Hill Road, Newington NH. Information: info@pontine.org / 603-436-6660.

John Farrell's solo staging of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets affords audiences a rare opportunity to submerge themselves in the poem's extraordinary musicality and spiritual power. First undertaken in 2011 with permission - rarely granted - from Eliot's estate, Farrell's performance is an immersion into Eliot's poetic exploration of humankind's relationship with time and with experience itself.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, T. S. Eliot is known for such poems as The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, among many other works of poetry, prose and drama. He wrote the poems constituting Four Quartets from 1936 to 1942, and they were published as a book in 1943. The work addresses the connections of the personal and historical present and past, spiritual renewal, and the very nature of experience.

Farrell opens the text in ways that lie beyond the scope of a solitary reading. He does not act. He does not impersonate. He presents the poem seriously, intelligently, and respectfully. He give the words space to work."

Farrell's performance is not only technically flawless, but also deeply moving, as he transforms himself into an instrument through which Eliot's poetry can pour and embody itself, a cry from one human to another.

John Farrell and his wife, Carol Farrell, are Co-founders of Figures of Speech Theatre. Since 1982, the company has toured the world with original works created at the intersection of drama, poetry, sculpture and dance. Figures of Speech is a four-time recipient of the coveted UNIMA Citation of Excellence, the highest distinction in American puppet theatre.