Deconstructing Young Romance with Chaotic Spontaneity A playwright can build a mountain out of any molehill. That's our job. We inflate reality into theatrical realms. We groom everyday ordinaries into Broadway dramas. A playwright can and must create topical explosions which means that all playwrights can discover a story, no matter the subject. The "what" is never the problem. Perhaps surprisingly, most playwrights have more trouble determining the "when", the sequence, the structure. The issue is, anything in life can happen at anytime. We think things must happen for a reason but no, not at all, guys, the truism is overwhelming: Things just happen.
Here's how it works: Fifty-two scenes are represented by a deck of fifty-cards and each night, at the top of the show, two actors (a different pair each night, four different pairs in total) throw the deck in the air, collect the cards, and perform the scenes in a new order. This non-structure structure is actually quite brilliant. A lot of relationships are just stories we tell. We have them, they die, we memorialize them and our memory of them is influenced by the chaos within which we experienced them. Our stories are experientially and emotionally devised by the structure of our memories. The more chaos there is, the more emotion. Therefore, get ready for a dangerously exciting presentation of real-life spontaneity and the resulting emotional consequences. If no one knows what's going to happen in the show...then...no one knows what's going to happen in the show...It makes me as nervous as falling in love or as breaking up with a loved one or as nervous as being single for the rest of my life. The show will stir your stomach a bit but, the good news is, the actors are also on their toes. A show with so much emotional potential insists that performers must trusts their improvisational skills as well as, I can imagine, their emotional decorum. Ordinarily, in a structured show, performers can prepare their appropriate emo-buttons for the oncoming pushing but, in this case, they have to acknowledge before hand that their open-hearts must be monitored closely throughout. The experience presented therefore epitomizes the high-strung emotional realm of the twenty-something year-old individual, a realm that The Howland Company often excites on stage. The exhaustion that overcomes two characters, two performers who have no idea what is coming next, mimics the exhaustion of the young individuals The Howland Company is seeking to reach.
With chaos and passion up in the air, there's no way this show won't shake-up your Fringe line up. It's seventy-five minutes of who-the-hell-knows and it will defy all the other relationship plays you see this summer. CHECK IT OUT! 52 Pick-Up Opens at The Tarragon Extraspace July 3rd, 7 pm ADDITIONAL SHOW TIMES July 05 at 10:30 PM July 08 at 03:00 PM July 10 at 01:45 PM July 11 at 05:45 PM July 12 at 08:45 PM July 13 at 05:15 PM ADDITIONAL INFORMATION www.howlandcompanytheatre.com The Howland Company will also be producing a new translation of Ödön Von Horvàth’s “Kasimir and Karoline” as translated and adapted by Holger Syme, Chair of English and Drama at the University of Toronto, and one of our founding members Paolo Santalucia. They hope to have a staged reading ready for late autumn.
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