UT Tyler Theatre Program Announces Repertory Season

October 10, 2001

The University of Texas at Tyler’s award-winning Theatre Repertory Company will present a season of “Contemporary International Comedy with Contrast’’ this year, Dr. James A. Hatfield, director of theatre, has announced.

International comedy will be the central theme of the theatre’s 2001-02 season, which will include five productions and one revival of the summer 2000 southwest premier production of A.R. Gurney’s “Ancestral Voices.’’

“We have been most fortunate this year to negotiate the production rights to several plays recently produced in London and New York,’’ Hatfield said. “The international comedies we will stage each hide a darker theme, message or societal issue. Come prepared to laugh and enjoy the productions this season and prepare to leave the theatre in conversation drawn from the themes and events in these plays.”

The season will open with Alan Ayckbourn’s “Comic Potential’’ on Oct. 12-14, Oct. 26-28 and Nov. 16-18 in The Theatre, located in the UT Tyler Physical and Health Education Building.

Written as a love story depicting actors with artificial intelligence performing “soap operas, ” Ayckbourn, the acknowledged master of British comedy, describes the play as set in the foreseeable future where everything has changed except human nature. A mechanical female “actoid” falls in love and struggles to cope with human emotions at the same time a young man ignores all logic and reason to love her, said Hatfield, who will be the production’s director.

UT Tyler will be among the first professional and university theatre companies to stage Ayckbourn’s 52nd play, which won an Olivier Award for the London production.

“Comic Potential’’ will be UT Tyler’s entry in the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival with an additional tour performance at Texas A&M University – Commerce in October.

The fall season will continue with Martin McDonagh’s contemporary tragic-comedy, “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,’’ Nov. 9-11 and Nov. 30-Dec 2 at The Theatre. The play will be directed by Dr. Mary Ellen Wright, lecturer in theatre.

Winner of four Tony awards in 1998, the play has been described as mixing comedy, mystery and tragedy together in an Irish story where a daughter’s dreams and her aging mother’s needs collide. The play moves freely from acerbic comedy to a darkly tragic-comic view of family relations, Wright said.
“Ancestral Voices’’ will be restaged during the weekend of Dec. 7 in memoriam and recognition of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Other season productions include Yazmin Rena’s contemporary comedy, “Art,’’ which will open in February 2002 in The Theatre. In “Art,’’ three friends debate the meaning of art when one of the group strives to become a patron of fine arts by purchasing an “all-white” painting.

An additional benefit production to be announced later will be staged as a chamber play in February in the UT Tyler Cowan Center Braithwaite Recital Hall.

“The Sound of Music,’’ a collaborative presentation by the theatre and music programs, will be presented in late March and early April of 2002 at the UT Tyler Cowan Center Vaughn Auditorium. The play will be set against the backdrop of clouds of war and totalitarianism.

“Our schedule of repertory performances, seasons with a central theme and parallel plays which culminate in an international travel/study tour, remains a unique format of presenting theatre in Texas, and we hope our audiences this year will agree,” Hatfield said.

Repertory performance curtain times are 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. for Sunday matinees.

A general admission season pass for the six repertory productions is $40, a $15 discount off single show tickets and equivalent to attending “The Sound of Music’’ for free, Hatfield said. Single show repertory tickets are $8 general admission for productions and $15 general admission for the musical. Senior adult, student and group rates are available

The UT Tyler Theatre Repertory Company has received numerous Kennedy Center American College Theatre Awards including excellence awards in acting, production, design and technical coordination.

For information contact the UT Tyler Theatre office at (903) 566-7490.