BOO-Arts Announces MRS WARREN'S PROFESSION 4/1-4/18

BOO-Arts Productions is pleased to announce their production of George Bernard Shaw's MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION, directed by Kathleen O'Neill. MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION will play a three-week limited engagement at Manhattan Theatre Source (177 MacDougal Street, New York, NY 10011). Performances begin Wednesday, April 1st and continue through Saturday, April 18th. Opening Night is Thursday, April 2nd (7 p.m.).

Mrs. Warren is the proprietress of a string of highly successful brothels. Her daughter, Vivie, is a modern young woman, but not so modern that she can ignore the source of her mother's wealth. The clash of these two strong-willed and culturally constrained Victorian women is the spark that ignites the ironic wit of one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest plays. Initially banned after its 1893 publication for its startling frankness, Mrs. Warren's Profession, a withering critique of male domination, sexual hypocrisy, and societal convention, remains a provocative and powerful work of progressive theater.

The production stars Joy Franz (Original Broadway productions of Pippin, Musical Chairs, Open Admissions and Into The Woods; Broadway revivals of Guys & Dolls and Into The Woods) in the role of Mrs. Warren.

Costume design is by David Withrow (IT Award recipient for Bug Boy Blues).

MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION plays the following regular schedule through Saturday, April 18th:

Wednesdays at 7 p.m.
Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Fridays at 8 p.m.
Saturdays at 8 p.m.

Tickets are $18 and are now available online at www.TheatreSource.org or by calling 212-501-4751. Tickets may also be purchased in-person at the Manhattan Theatre Source, 177 MacDougal Street.

For more information about Mrs. Warren's Profession visit www.BOO-Arts.com.

KATHLEEN O'NEILL (Director) is the founder and Director of BOO-Arts, a company she began after twenty years in the "Business". As a director, actor, teacher/coach and producer, she has worked in New York, Boston, Miami, and at the University of Wyoming. Directing credits range from Pinero's Short Eyes and William Wells' Gertrude Stein and A Companion, to Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward. The successful and critically acclaimed production of The House of Bernarda Alba launched BOO-Arts. Most recent NYC acting credits include originating the role of Su in A Collapse (Manhattan Theatre Source/NYC Fringe Festival), Lyubov in Cherry Orchard and Clytemnestra in The Greeks; other favorites include Olympia in The Conduct of Life and Jessica Lyons in The Cat's Paw. She has been working for the past 8 years as a director, actor and volunteer for Manhattan Theatre Source, where BOO-Arts is a resident company.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (Playwright) (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working in an estate agent's office he moved to London (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among these, Widower's Houses and Mrs. Warren's Profession savagely attack social hypocrisy, while in plays such as Arms and the Man and The Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaw's radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous discourses on the Life Force, «Don Juan in Hell», the third act of the dramatization of woman's love chase of man, Man and Superman (1903).

Other important plays by Shaw are Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), a historical play filled with allusions to modern times, and Androcles and the Lion (1912), in which he exercised a kind of retrospective history and from modern movements drew deductions for the Christian era. In Major Barbara (1905), one of Shaw's most successful «discussion» plays, the audience's attention is held by the power of the witty argumentation that man can achieve aesthetic salvation only through political activity, not as an individual. The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), facetiously classified as a tragedy by Shaw, is really a comedy the humour of which is directed at the medical profession. Candida (1898), with social attitudes toward sex relations as objects of his satire, and Pygmalion (1912), a witty study of phonetics as well as a clever treatment of middle-class morality and class distinction, proved some of Shaw's greatest successes on the stage. It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavour. (www.nobelprize.org)

BOO-Arts Productions is a production company born of the combined experience of artist-producers working in several aspects of theatre & live staged productions. With an eye on provocative social topics that encourage conversation and debate, the directive of BOO is to present that which you have not imagined, making you ask yourself why you have not imagined it before. BOO-Arts is a resident company at Manhattan Theatre Source in Greenwich Village, NYC

BOO-Arts mission is to stimulate thought and provoke discussion that will benefit our diverse community through various artistic mediums.

Past productions include La Vigilia (The Vigil), 12 Angry Women, The Story Of Herr Rath and The House Of Bernarda Alba.