Shadow and Light Presents TWO BY PINTER

Shadow and Light Theatre Company, will be performing Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska and Ashes to Ashes at the Bullitt Cabaret at ACT Theatre in Seattle. Performances are from Jan. 22 to Feb. 7 (preview performance Jan. 21). Tickets can be purchased through the ACT Ticket office by calling (206)292-7676 or online at www.acttheatre.org.

Shadow and Light Theatre is a new, independent company primarily devoted to the works of the late Nobel Laureate playwright Harold Pinter. Founding members of the Company are Victor Pappas, the former associate artistic director of Intiman Theatre, and two distinguished Seattle-based actors, Suzanne Bouchard and Frank Corrado. Mr. Corrado initiated a series of readings of Pinter plays last season at ACT that uncovered an engaged and devoted audience eager for more. That series, Pinter Fortnightly, provided in partthe impetus to form Shadow and Light.

Shadow and Light is proud to present these extraordinary plays in grateful association with ACT - A Contemporary Theatre through its Central Heating Lab program. ACT has a history of producing Pinter's uniquely fascinating works, and has lent generous support to Shadow and Light's first venture.

The company will present A Kind of Alaska and Ashes to Ashes. Pinter was inspired to write A Kind of Alaska after reading Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, an account of a number of patients afflicted with the neurological disorder encephalitis lethargica -commonly called ‘ sleeping sickness'- who were administered the drug L-Dopa and brought out of the trance-like states they had been in for decades. Pinter's play, warmly admired and endorsed by Sacks, is both a strangely amusing and finally heartrending exploration of a woman's disorienting journey from mysterious darkness into tenuous light. Guest Artist Kimberly King joins Bouchard and Corrado in the production.

Ashes to Ashes was not so much inspired as prompted by another very different literary source: a biography of the Nazi industrialist Albert Speer. What appears at first to be a playfully witty domestic conversation between a wife and husband gradually evolves into a haunting and haunted meditation on the "banality of evil" specific to the history of the twentieth century with the underlying implication that "No man is an island." Ashes to Ashes was one of Pinter's last plays; it is widely regarded as a masterpiece, though it has never been professionally staged in Seattle.

 

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