Crestfall
Tonight I went with my friend Matt Reckeweg to the Studio Theatre downtown to see Mark O'Rowe's Crestfall. I have been thinking recently that I need to take more advantage of and see more D.C. theatre, so whenever I received the e-mail that I could get free tickets to this show I jumped on it! It was my first visit to the Studio Theatre, which is in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, and I loved it! A gorgeous space with 3 or 4 separate theatres, all different types of theatre spaces. The design is very modern chic: brick, glass, and cement with very clean lines and modern furniture tucked away. Crestfall was in Theatre 4 on the top level, a very experimental type of blackbox space that can vary in size for the different shows. This show utilized about half of the given space, had audience facing each other on two, opposing sides, and only one chair served as a semi-setting/prop for one character. The show instead mainly focused on the stories.
Crestfall is an Irish play by O'Rowe who is an Irish playwright. The piece centers on three different women who live in a bad district in an Irish city and how they're grotesquely connected through their tramas and problems. Just finishing McPhereson's The Weir and having seen Irish theatre performed elsewhere, such as McDonaugh's The Pillowman on Broadway, I'm beginning to understand and fully appreciate the basis of Irish theatre. That basis is to tell a story. The Wier was a piece in which the characters all related through haunting stories of their past, Pillowman was a story about a storyteller and his stories, and Crestfall is about the stories of three different but deeply connected women. All very wordy: the use of language to accentuate the story allowing beauty to emerge from the pages. These plays are all connected by a strong sense of storytelling, an oral tradition that runs deep in Ireland and was brought to America by its Irish settlers, many of whom ended up in SW Va and NE Tn. So now the stoytelling tradition lives and thrives in the foothills of Appalachia and provides me with something I can totally relate to these Irish works. So I am almost emotionally connected to these pieces in a cultural sense as well. I have some Irish ancestry but, even though these plays are based on people thousands of miles away in a country I've never visited, I know these people. They're people I grew up with and am related to. Their mannerisms and patterns of speech are parallel to my upbringing. So needless to say, I truly enjoyed this experience and will definitely be attending a show here again, soon! But Nine Parts of Desire is to be seen next at Arena Stage!
Crestfall is an Irish play by O'Rowe who is an Irish playwright. The piece centers on three different women who live in a bad district in an Irish city and how they're grotesquely connected through their tramas and problems. Just finishing McPhereson's The Weir and having seen Irish theatre performed elsewhere, such as McDonaugh's The Pillowman on Broadway, I'm beginning to understand and fully appreciate the basis of Irish theatre. That basis is to tell a story. The Wier was a piece in which the characters all related through haunting stories of their past, Pillowman was a story about a storyteller and his stories, and Crestfall is about the stories of three different but deeply connected women. All very wordy: the use of language to accentuate the story allowing beauty to emerge from the pages. These plays are all connected by a strong sense of storytelling, an oral tradition that runs deep in Ireland and was brought to America by its Irish settlers, many of whom ended up in SW Va and NE Tn. So now the stoytelling tradition lives and thrives in the foothills of Appalachia and provides me with something I can totally relate to these Irish works. So I am almost emotionally connected to these pieces in a cultural sense as well. I have some Irish ancestry but, even though these plays are based on people thousands of miles away in a country I've never visited, I know these people. They're people I grew up with and am related to. Their mannerisms and patterns of speech are parallel to my upbringing. So needless to say, I truly enjoyed this experience and will definitely be attending a show here again, soon! But Nine Parts of Desire is to be seen next at Arena Stage!
posted by ~chase at 8:45 PM
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