Traveling Players Will Perform SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

Traveling Players presents Carlo Goldoni's slapstick comedy, Servant of Two Masters.  The play will perform on weekends, Sept. 27 – Oct. 5, at the Traveling Players Studio in Tysons Corner Center.  Performed by Traveling Players' middle school students, the play, which was originally written in the 1700s, is a joyful romp filled with slapstick comedy that would feel right at home with the Looney Tunes. 

Synopsis of the play: 

Chaos abounds in this sitcom-esque comedy of errors!  Truffaldino, a wily (and hungry) servant, has the perfect plan for financial success.  If one master equals one salary's worth of food and comfort, then two masters mean twice the comfort and a double serving at every meal!  It's a foolproof business model... so long as his bosses never learn about one another.

Too bad they're searching for each other right now!  One "master" is secretly a young woman disguised as her dead brother, and the other is ... wait for it... her fiancé... who killed her brother!?!

This production is a remount of the play originally performed this summer by students at Traveling Players' residential summer camp in Christchurch, VA. 

The fall remount of the middle school summer play is a beloved tradition at Traveling Players, dating back almost 20 years to 2006.  Director Morgan Shotwell, who has been the head of middle school programs since 2021, is a Traveling Players alumnus.  She performed in two remounts as a camper and got her start directing in 2012 when she was a student assistant director under Producing Artistic Director Jeanne Harrison for the remount of Carlo Gozzi's The Blue Monster. 

Says Shotwell about the tradition, “I see so much growth from my students during the remount. They come into the first rehearsal more like professionals, with a stronger understanding of the play and the characters.  We only get six rehearsals to put everything together, and the show inevitably gets more complicated than it was over the summer.  It is an exhilarating artistic challenge.” 

The play will be performed four times at Traveling Players Studio, located inside Tysons Corner Center.  Traveling Players is an educational theatre company and will be welcoming new students in their fall acting classes and plays, which begin later this month.