From Boston Marriage to Arcadia, here we go!!February 1st 2008 |
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Boston Marriage Launches, Arcadia on deck…
February 1, 2008
One of the paradoxes about being an Artistic Director is that the allure of opening night doesn’t quite hold the same feelings of anxiety and excitement it once did when I was a free lance director, or even when I was an Associate Artistic Director. I am immensely proud of the work we do here, particularly on Boston Marriage, which is a funny, beautiful, wickedly good time in the theatre. But I liken running a theatre to running a professional football team. I once heard an NFL coach describe the highs and lows of coaching. He said something to the effect that with every victory you feel like you’ve escaped and with every loss, you die a little inside. As an Artistic Director, I couldn’t agree more. I generally spend our opening night receptions wondering how the next show in rehearsal is doing, how ticket sales for this show are projecting, what our cash flow looks like for the next month, what the review will say and how it will impact ticket sales…everything but what I saw on stage that night! Talking to other AD’s around the country, I don’t believe I am unique in this sentiment…You wake up the next day, if the review is good, you feel like you’ve escaped…if it is bad, you die a little on the inside. Such is our profession!!
As we look ahead to Arcadia, I have invited Rebecca Pearcy, who will be playing Thomasina, to share her rehearsal thoughts with us. As a means of introduction, let me say that Becky Pearcy is a tremendously talented 21 year old actor from London, England. When I was teaching in London last year, she was one of my students and my first day there, I asked the students if there was anyone who wanted to show me around London so I wouldn’t get lost! I offered to pay for theatre tickets to anyone who wanted the job, Becky volunteered and I spent the next week getting to know her. Upon my departure from London, I offered her a job when she graduated (she was a student in the American Theatre Arts program at Rose Bruford College) and to my delight, she took me up on my offer. Since October 2007, she has worked at AGL as my assistant but she is quite a talented actor in her own right. I am delighted she is making her American professional debut in our production of Arcadia, which is something we don’t get to say much around here.
Here is Becky’s bio:
Rebecca Pearcy is a British theatre practitioner and Actors Guild of Lexington’s newest addition to the team. She is a recent graduate from the Rose Bruford Drama College in London where she completed a first class Bachelor of Arts Degree in American Theater Arts. She trained in every area of theatre production but focused in her training as an actress and director specializing in Musical Theater. She spent one year at Stephen F Austin State University in Texas where she participated in theater classes and productions, including William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It was at SFA that she had the opportunity to direct a production of Moises Kaufmann’s The Laramie Project that toured to England the following year. Her favorite college productions include her interpretation of Esmeralda in Tennessee Williams Camino Real, Telephone Girl in the Jupiter Theatre company’s adaptation of Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal and Mary in Lillian Hellmann’s The Children’s Hour. Her professional experience includes a rehearsed reading at The Soho Theatre in London, a cabaret performance by the Essex Youth Roadshow at the London Palladium and assistant stage manager of the Actor’s Guild of Lexington’s Hamlet. She worked professionally as a singer before joining the Actors Guild of Lexington’s team as assistant to the Artistic Director.
Arcadia is really two stories in one. Written by the brilliant Tom Stoppard, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay of Shakespeare in Love as well as a boat load of Tony Awards for his mammoth The Coast of Utopia last year, Arcadia concerns a 19th century prodigy in mathematics (Thomasina) and her discovery both of knowledge and self. Of course, with Stoppard, it is also about so much more than that as well. The imminent critic John Heilpern said of the original Broadway production: “To say Arcadia is currently the best play on Broadway is to say less than I would wish. Let’s settle, simply, for the best.”
And on that note, I take great pleasure in posting our first blog entry from Rebecca Pearcy, which we will call From Thomasina’s Journals.
Boston Marriage opens tonight and runs through February 24.
Arcadia previews March 13, opens March 14 and runs through April 6.
For tickets to either show, please call the LexArts box office at 859-225-0370 or email boxoffice@lexarts.org.
I’ll see you at the theatre…
Peace and Love
Richard (Rick) St. Peter
Artistic Director
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