Stage Coach Players of DeKalb will be producing five short plays from Tony Award and Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter as its yearly black box production. Included in the production are Monologue, Precisely, Press Conference, One For The Road andThe Dumb Waiter. The five plays, directed by Tim Ball, represent the basic genres Pinter is renowned for: memory plays, overtly political plays and ‘comedies of menace’ plays. The production includes plays Pinter wrote throughout his five decades as a dramatist, screenwriter, writer of fiction, prose and poetry.
Monologue is a memory play where we find a woman talking about a shared past with a person that only she can see. In Precisely, two people discuss the precise number of casualties expected after an intended nuclear launch. The Minister of Culture in a totalitarian government takes questions from the press in Press Conference.
Act One ends with One For The Road. Set in a prison of an oppressive government as an interrogator questions a husband and wife both who are political prisoners, along with that of their 8-year old son. The whole of Act Two is The Dumb Waiter, one of Pinter’s first plays and falls into the category of a ‘comedy of menace’. Two assassins wait in a small room, possibly in the basement of an abandoned restaurant, for their next assignment. And then the old dumb waiter begins to clang into action and food orders follow.
The cast features Richard Christensen, Bobby Draganowski, Mike Groark, D’Ann Hamilton-White, Darlene Hillman, Edward Keating, Bonnie Miller, Scott Montavon, G. Scott Morris, Chris Porterfield, Norm Read, Angela Schiola-Niemeyer and Aaron Schryver.
Performances for the Harold Pinter Black Box are January 31st through February 2nd with a curtain time of 7:30, along with Sunday matinees on February 3rd with a curtain time of 2:00. Tickets are $5 each. To order online, visit our website at www.stagecoachers.com. Tickets will also be available to purchase at the door.
