MEDIA CONTACT: Judy Moore at (847) 491-4819 or jkm229@northwestern.edu

March 9, 2004

Play About Artist Rene Magritte Opens April 15

EVANSTON, Ill. --- “This is Not a Pipe Dream,” Barry Kornhauser’s imaginative and creative family play about renowned “surrealist” artist René Magritte (1898-1967), focuses on his youth and his journey to become an artist in spite of numerous obstacles.

Suitable for audiences aged 7 to 87, public performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 15; 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 16; 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 17; and 2 p.m. Sunday, April 18, at the Ethel M. Barber Theatre, 30 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston campus.

The production also will tour seven Evanston and Chicago elementary and middle schools this spring.

“This play is filled with physical comedy and coupled with important ideas,” said Northwestern University theatre faculty member Lynn Kelso, who is directing the upcoming production. “To appeal to children, the story of René as a young child is presented through slapstick, music, word play and vaudeville.”

As a child, Magritte’s father told him that his desire to become a painter was merely a “pipe dream.” Rather than become discouraged, the young Magritte followed his dream with the encouragement of his mother whom he tragically lost when he was 14. At 15, he met his future wife -- Georgette Berger. They were married nine years later.

Kelso said Kornhauser’s play is written in the magic surrealistic style that appears in Magritte’s paintings. The Surrealism movement that began in the mid-1920s drew heavily on dreams, the irrational and fantasy.

“This Surrealism causes the viewer to stop and look from a different point of view. Watching the young painter struggle with the adult world, his teacher and his father, in order to become an artist, the audience learns that ‘words’ often confuse. What do words represent? How do we know what someone says is real? What is hidden behind the words and behind the images?”

The central focus of the stage’s set design will be a large Magritte-style painting of the sky with the actors becoming the parts of the picture. This sky painting upstage will be combined with simple boxes on the stage that will appear to have fallen out of the painting. The actors become the play’s characters.

“Using Magritte’s trademarks -- little men in bowler hats, windows, apples, draped scarves on heads, and rocks -- the actors entertain and take the audience into the world of the artist and the play to encourage us ‘to follow the dream’ and to see the world as a child with all its mystery and surprise of seeing something for the first time,” said Kelso.

During each performance, the play’s interlocutor will take the audience in and out of the scenes to remind them that plays are not reality, but only an illusion of it.

“Using paintings instead of words, René believed that ‘if you look at something to discover what it means, you end up no longer seeing the thing. It is to deny its wonder, its mystery, and the mystery of the visible.’ René was a thinker who communicated by means of paint,” added Kelso.

Northwestern University ‘s 2003-04 Mainstage season is supported by the Sara Lee Foundation.

Single tickets are $17 for the general public; $15 for senior citizens and Northwestern faculty and staff; and $9 for full-time students. For more information or to order tickets by phone, call the Theatre and Interpretation Center box office at (847) 491-7282.

Online ticket sales for Northwestern Mainstage productions also are available through TicketWeb.com by going to the Northwestern Theatre and Interpretation Center Web site at http://www.tic.northwestern.edu/tickets.html and clicking the TicketWeb icon.