FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training to Present THE WATER ENGINE

The FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training's 2014-15 season opens with Pulitzer Prize winning and Tony Award nominated American playwright David Mamet's riveting drama THE WATER ENGINE. Originally written as a radio drama for NPR, the play made its stage debut in 1977 and received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding New Play.

Directed by Greg Leaming, the director of the Conservatory, and performed by an ensemble of eight second-year Conservatory students, this thrilling play will have one "Pay What You Can Performance" preview on Tuesday, November 4 at 7:30pm and open on Wednesday, November 5 at 8pm, running through Sunday, November 23. The Conservatory especially encourages new audience members to attend the preview "Pay What You Can Performance" of THE WATER ENGINE and pay whatever they can afford for their tickets. These special tickets are only available on the day of the performance.

A true American theatre icon, Mamet's celebrated pieces include Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, and American Buffalo. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1984 for Glengarry Glen Ross. Acclaimed for his edgy writing style, Mamet abandons traditional forms of stage dialogue and utilizes gritty, realistic street-talk. Referred to as "Mamet speak," his writing is filled with intentional fragments, run-on sentences, and mis-spoken phrases, giving his characters a more realistic pattern of speech.

Loyal to its original form as a radio drama, THE WATER ENGINE opens in a simple 1930s radio station as an announcer welcomes his listeners to the Century of Progress Exposition at the World's Fair in Chicago. Initially told through the art of sound, the play follows the struggle of Lang, a suppressed factory worker on the verge of patenting his design of the most revolutionary invention of the century: an engine that runs on water. Consumed by the fear of his work being stolen, Lang takes every precaution possible to protect himself against the unknown threats of powerful corporations and their ruthless leaders. As the plot moves forward, the tale draws the actors away from the microphones, and the station merges with the world of the story, echoing the play's constant question of what is true and what is fantasy.

"THE WATER ENGINE offers us the collision between these two worlds: one of desperation and one of supreme optimism," said Greg Leaming. "Mamet's nihilistic view of man and his innate greed, seen in so many of his other works, is framed here in a form of limitless potential and contrasted by an exposition fueled with the naïve optimism that the average man in Chicago so desperately needed to survive. It's a contrast that has resonance today more than any time since its first production in 1974."

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