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. |