Durang's Brightly Tinted Horrors Focus of Visiting Director Project
“Life’s horrors in the primary colors of absurdist comedy,” according to Frank Rich of the New York Times, will be unveiled this fall on the Loeb Drama Center’s mainstage in The Marriage of Bette and Boo by Christopher Durang ’71. The Visiting Director Project production, featuring an all-undergraduate cast and creative team, will be directed by Marcus Stern, Associate Director of Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) and the A.R.T./Moscow Art Theatre School Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. Durang’s 1985 play will open October 20.
The Visiting Director Project is a collaboration of the A.R.T., the Office for the Arts, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC). Established in 1995 by the A.R.T. and HRDC, the Project provides opportunities for Harvard students to develop full-scale theatrical productions at the Loeb under the direction of accomplished professionals.
“I’ve always thought Bette and Boo was one of the great plays, not just of Durang’s work, but one of the great plays period,” states Marcus Stern. “Hopefully, years from now people will recognize it as one of the ‘important’ plays. It’s got a rare balance of remarkable humor and heartbreak. I really can’t think of many scripts that come close to walking this line so well.”
Durang himself has cited the play as one of his favorites, and discussed its importance to the development of his career during a public conversation on campus last May when he received the Harvard Arts Medal.
“Marcus is a wonderful educator and mentor and he has chosen a play that is both very sensitive and outright hysterical, written by one of Harvard’s own,” says Blase Ur ’07, president of the HRDC and set designer for The Marriage of Bette and Boo. “We see our own family lives thoughtfully reflected in this wonderful script and can relate to the trials of growing up at this time in our lives when we like to think we have it all figured out.”
In addition to his ongoing duties at the A.R.T., where he has directed notable productions of plays by Adam Rapp, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Suzan-Lori Parks and many others, Stern has helmed productions at Theater Neumarkt in Zurich; Actors Theatre of Louisville and its Humana Festival; the Magic Theater in San Francisco; the Mark Taper Form’s Taper Too in Los Angeles; and the Joseph Papp Public Theater, Primary Stages, Dance Theater Workshop, Whitney Museum Biennial, and Soho Rep in New York.
His adaptations include Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (Zurich); Phoebe’s Got Three Sisters (Cucaracha Theater in New York); and Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown (New York University). Stern has also taught at the Yale School of Drama, New York University, and Columbia University. He is a faculty advisor for undergraduate theater at Harvard, and teaches at the Harvard Extension School and A.R.T.’s Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.
The Marriage of Bette and Boo plays at the Loeb Drama Center October 20-28; information and tickets: www.hrdctheater.com or 617.547.8300.
