mabou mines dollhouse - Walker Art Center
mabou mines dollhouse - Walker Art Center
mabou mines dollhouse - Walker Art Center
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
NEWS<br />
Press Contact: Rachel Joyce 612.375.7635 rachel.joyce@walkerart.org<br />
Online Press Room: http://press.walkerart.org<br />
WALKER ART CENTER PRESENTS LEGENDARY<br />
EXPERIMENTAL THEATER COMPANY MABOU MINES’<br />
OBIE AWARD-WINNING MABOU MINES DOLLHOUSE<br />
Mabou Mines DollHouse<br />
Photo: Richard Termine<br />
“The whole experience is so fascinating—thrilling here, confounding there—that it<br />
must be seen.” —New York Times<br />
Minneapolis, October 14, 2005—Legendary experimental theater<br />
company Mabou Mines returns to the <strong>Walker</strong> <strong>Art</strong> <strong>Center</strong> with the Obie<br />
Award–winning Mabou Mines DollHouse, vanguard director Lee Breuer’s<br />
beautifully radical and unpredictable adaptation of the Ibsen classic, on<br />
Wednesday–Saturday, November 9–12, at 8 pm, and Saturday–Sunday,<br />
November 12–13, at 2 pm, in the William and Nadine McGuire Theater.<br />
Still shockingly relevant, this tale of a suffocating marriage and the<br />
growing 19th-century feminist consciousness is viewed through an<br />
upended prism of proportion and scale: literally manifesting the power<br />
struggles in the work, the male actors are no taller than four feet, while the<br />
female actors tower at six feet plus. Presented with a deft touch of magical<br />
and psychological realism, this doll’s house is transformed from bourgeois<br />
tragedy into cutting comedy with a deep and poignant bite, replete with a<br />
chorus of marionettes. Contains brief nudity.<br />
Directly following the Friday, November 11, performance, Mabou Mines<br />
director Lee Breuer and <strong>Walker</strong> senior curator Philip Bither will participate<br />
in a post-performance discussion.<br />
Mabou Mines, an avant-garde theater company established in 1970 and<br />
based in New York City, emphasizes the creation of new work from<br />
original texts and the use of existing texts staged from a specific point of<br />
view. Over the years, members of the company have included JoAnne<br />
Akalaitis, William Raymond, Greg Mehrten, Ellen McElduff, L.B. Dallas,<br />
Philip Glass, and David Warrilow, along with the present company<br />
members: Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, Frederick Neumann, Terry<br />
O’Reilly, Sharon Fogarty, and Julie Archer. The company’s collaborations<br />
with such composers as Glass, Lenny Picket, Bob Telson, John Zorn,<br />
MABOU MINES DOLLHOUSE NO. 96 1
Mabou Mines DollHouse<br />
Photo: Richard Termine<br />
Pauline Oliveros, and David Byrne, as well as esteemed visual artists,<br />
comprise a unique collaborative history.<br />
The composition of the company is the result of years of shared work in<br />
the United States and abroad. The six members comprise the present<br />
artistic directorate, making all decisions concerning repertory and touring;<br />
function as actors, writers, designers, and technicians; and serve as the<br />
producers of each season as well as members of the Board of Directors.<br />
Mabou Mines was named after a community in Nova Scotia near which<br />
the founding members of the company (Akalaitis, Breuer, Maleczech,<br />
Glass, and Warrilow) created The Red Horse Animation in 1970. In the<br />
past three decades, Mabou Mines has produced eight pieces by Samual<br />
Beckett, six of which have been world premieres of texts not originally<br />
written for the theater.<br />
Lee Breuer<br />
Company founding member Breuer’s most recent work with Mabou Mines<br />
is as director of Red Beads, Animal Magnetism, and Peter and Wendy,<br />
which won five OBIE Awards, a Drama League Award, and an American<br />
Theater Wing Award. In 1990, he adapted and directed Mabou Mines<br />
Lear—a gender reversed production of King Lear.<br />
In the early 1970s, he adapted and directed three works by Beckett for<br />
Mabou Mines—Play, Come and Go, and The Lost Ones—all of which<br />
received OBIEs. He is the author and director of Mabou Mines’ trilogy<br />
Animations, including The B. Beaver, The Red Horse, and The Shaggy<br />
Dog Animation. The Shaggy Dog was awarded the OBIE for Best Play in<br />
1978. In 1980 his play A Prelude to a Death in Venice received OBIEs for<br />
both his direction and his script. He also wrote Hajj for Mabou Mines,<br />
which opened at The Public Theater and toured in the U.S., Japan, Brazil,<br />
Korea, and Russia.<br />
His theater work outside Mabou Mines includes The Tempest for Joseph<br />
Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park, and Lulu for Robert Brustein’s American<br />
Repertory Theater, as well as his music-theater collaborations as author<br />
and director with composer Bob Telson. These include Sister Suzie<br />
Cinema, which premiered at The Public Theater and was televised on the<br />
PBS series Alive From Off <strong>Center</strong>; and The Gospel at Colonus, (adapted<br />
from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus), a co-commission of the <strong>Walker</strong> <strong>Art</strong><br />
<strong>Center</strong> which premiered at The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave<br />
Festival, and was performed on Broadway at The Lunt-Fontanne Theater<br />
in 1988. Breuer was nominated for a Tony Award for the book. Gospel was<br />
televised on the PBS series Great Performances. It received numerous<br />
awards, including the 1984 OBIE Best Musical and the ASCAP Popular<br />
Music Award. Breuer and Telson’s most recent collaboration was The<br />
Warrior Ant, which ran at Alice Tully Hall and at The Harvey at Brooklyn<br />
Academy of Music.<br />
Breuer’s published work includes La Divina Caricatura (Green Integer<br />
Press), Animations: A Trilogy for Mabou Mines (Performing <strong>Art</strong>s Journal<br />
Publication), Sister Suzie Cinema: The collected Poems and Performances<br />
MABOU MINES DOLLHOUSE NO. 96 2
Mabou Mines DollHouse<br />
Photo: Richard Termine<br />
1976-1986 (Theater Communications Group Publications), inclusion of A<br />
Prelude to Death in Venice in TCGs New Plays USA 1, and The Gospel at<br />
Colonus (TCG). He has been awarded playwriting grants and fellowships<br />
from CAPS, the National Endowment for the <strong>Art</strong>s, The Rockefeller<br />
Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, and the McKnight Foundation.<br />
He was a Japan-United States Friendship Commission exchange fellow<br />
and delivered the opening address of the Beckett Chair at Trinity College<br />
in Dublin. He also received a Fulbright Fellowship for theater studies in<br />
India. He was co-chairman of the directing department at Yale School of<br />
Drama from 1986-1989 and was on the faculty at Stanford University until<br />
1999. In 1997 he was awarded a fellowship from the John D. and<br />
Catherine T. Mac<strong>Art</strong>hur Foundation. He is currently a 2005/06 Radcliff<br />
College Bunting Fellow.<br />
Tickets to Mabou Mines DollHouse are $25 ($13 <strong>Walker</strong> members) on<br />
Wednesday; $25 ($20 <strong>Walker</strong> members) on Thursday, Saturday and<br />
Sunday matinees; $32 ($26 <strong>Walker</strong> members) on Friday and are available<br />
by contacting the <strong>Walker</strong> <strong>Art</strong> <strong>Center</strong> box office at 612.375.7600 or<br />
walkerart.org/tickets.<br />
Special funding for DollHouse was provided by The Peter Jay Sharp<br />
Foundation, The Blue Ridge Foundation, Altria Group, Inc., Lawton Wehle<br />
Fitt and James McClaren Foundation, Jes Scheuer, Jo Mellicker and<br />
Fredrick Sherman. Originally produced for Mabou Mines by Lisa Harris,<br />
Associate Producer Dovetail Productions and Robert Blacker, Mabou<br />
Mines DollHouse was developed as part of New York Theatre Workshop’s<br />
Jonathan Larson Lab 2002 and Sundance Institute Theater Laboratory<br />
2003.<br />
The <strong>Walker</strong> <strong>Art</strong> <strong>Center</strong>'s Performing <strong>Art</strong>s Program is generously supported<br />
by funds from the Doris Duke Charitable Dance Foundation through the<br />
Doris Duke Fund for Jazz and the Doris Duke Performing <strong>Art</strong>s Endowment<br />
Fund.<br />
<strong>Walker</strong> <strong>Art</strong> <strong>Center</strong> programming is made possible by its Premier Partners:<br />
Best Buy, General Mills, Target, Star Tribune, and WCCO-TV.<br />
Promotional partner Mpls. St. Paul Magazine.<br />
The <strong>Walker</strong> <strong>Art</strong> <strong>Center</strong> is located at 1750 Hennepin Avenue—where Hennepin meets<br />
Lyndale—one block off Highways I-94 and I-394, Minneapolis.<br />
For public information, call 612.375.7600, or visit walkerart.org.<br />
MABOU MINES DOLLHOUSE NO. 96 3