Coward on the Coast: eNewsletter                   November 6, 2010

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In This Issue
Blithe Spirit Tonight through Dec 17 at A Noise Within
Canadian Premiere of Brief Encounter Coming Nov 27 to Vancouver, BC
Notes on October 6th Talk by Professor Richard Dellamora
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What's On - from California to Alaska

Blithe Spirit
continues tonight through Dec. 17 at A Noise Within (Brand Boulevard Theatre), home of the classical repertory company of Glendale, CA. 


Good news for west-coast Canadian Coward fans: the Canadian Premiere of  Brief Encounter, adapted by Emma Rice for Kneehigh Theatre, opens Nov. 27 at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre in Vancouver, BC.

And ... last weekend for our furthest northern production of Blithe Spirit:  Nov. 6 and 7.  8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, Valley Performing Arts, 251 W. Swanson Ave., Wasilla, Alaska. Directed by Dave Nufer. Tickets: $14-$16. Box office: 907-373-0195.

Blithe Spirit
A Noise Within (Brand Blvd Theatre), Glendale, CA
October 2 - December 17, 2010
Blithe Spirit
Directed by Damaso Rodriguez
Blithe Spirit seance
Photo by: Craig Schwartz.
L. to R.: Jacque Lynn Colton (Mrs. Bradmna), Scott Lowell (Charles Condomine), Jane Macfie (Madame Arcati), Jill Van Velzer (Ruth Condomine), Gibby Brand (Dr. Bradman)








A Noise Within (ANW)
234 South Brand Boulevard
Glendale, CA 91204
818-240-0910, Ext. 1

Tickets: $32 - $46, discounts for groups of 10+

November 6, 20 and December 2, 3, 11, 15, 16, 17 at 8:00 PM
November 7, 20, 28, and December 12 at 2:00 PM
November 7 at 7:00 PM

(Please confirm dates and times with the theatre.)

For more information and to purchase tickets, see:
A Noise Within theatre web site

The cast features Gibby Brand (Dr. Bradman), Jacque Lynn Colton (Mrs. Bradman), Abby Craden (Elvira Condomine), Alison Elliott (Edith), Scott Lowell (Charles Condomine), Jane Macfie (Madame Arcati), and Jill Van Velzer (Ruth Condomine).

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Canadian Premiere of Brief Encounter
Vancouver Playhouse TheatreVancouver, BC
November 27 - December 23, 2010
Brief Encounter (Vancouver, BC)
Brief Encounter
Adapted for the stage by
Emma Rice

Directed & Choreographed by Max Reimer
Musical Director Steve Charles


Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company

127 East 2nd Avenue, Vancouver, BC V5T 1B4
Administration/Production: 604 872 6622

Box Office: 604 873 3311
Call Centre: 604 629 2102
Fax: 604 873 3714
Hours: Mon-Fri 9:30am-5:00pm

Vancouver Playhouse web site

The Vancouver Playhouse is located in downtown Vancouver at the corner of Hamilton and Dunsmuir, and is part of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Complex.

The Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company's 2010/2011 production of No�l Coward 's Brief Encounter marks its Canadian premiere.  An extensive Playguide is available for downloading from the Vancouver Playhouse web site.

"A first-class return to romance" - Daily Telegraph

A co-production with Manitoba Theatre Centre

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Notes on October 6th Talk by Professor Dellamora
 
"Blithe Spirit with No�l Coward and Radclyffe Hall in Glendale"
 by Professor Richard Dellamora 

On Wednesday, October 6th at 6:30 PM, Southern California NCS member Professor Richard Dellamora, a Visiting Scholar at UCLA, presented a pre-show lecture about Coward and his contemporary Radclyffe Hall, to the audience at A Noise Within.  Professor Dellamora kindly provided the following notes about his lecture.

            In connection with the current production of Blithe Spirit in repertory at A Noise Within theater company in downtown Glendale, California, Richard Dellamora gave a pre-performance talk on the play, No�l Coward, and Radclyffe Hall, the novelist and activist on behalf of civil and social rights for lesbian subjects in England in the 1920s.  Building on Terry Castle's argument in No�l Coward and Radclyffe Hall (1996) that Coward bases the Spiritualist aspects of the play on Hall's interactions with the well-known medium, Mrs. Osborne Leonard, Dellamora discussed the probability that what Coward presents as heterosexual triangulation in the action of the play is based on the scandalous Sapphic triangle that existed between Hall, her first long-term partner, Mabel Veronica Batten, and Batten's much younger cousin, Una Troubridge.  After Batten's sudden death in 1916, Troubridge was to become Hall's fellow psychical researcher and eventual life partner.


            Dellamora contextualized his discussion within current performance practice of Coward's works.  In particular, two highly significant productions since 2000, Kneehigh Theatre's Brief Encounter, currently on Broadway, and Antaeus Theater's staged reading of Peace in Our Time in Los Angeles in summer, 2010, use new ways of prying open the highly efficient operation of genre within both plays.  Paradoxically, Coward's intuitive mastery of genre conventions risks impeding the success of his work with new audiences today.  In response to this situation, both Emma Rice of the Kneehigh production and Barry Creyton, who adapted Coward's play for the staging in L. A., do so in the first instance by inserting songs into their adaptations.  In this way, they effectively double the original works' genres of domestic realism and wartime melodrama by introducing the genres of music hall review and play with music, respectively.  In both cases, opening up the generic framework highlights the artifice of Coward's workmanship while simultaneously releasing the emotions that his technical control usually holds on a tight rein.  Both are highly successful productions.


            Dellamora argued that Coward's practice in Blithe Spirit licenses Rice and Creyton's contemporary approaches insofar as in the play Coward himself doubles the genre of romantic farce with the genre of the s�ance, an approach that opens the comedy of sexual rivalry with its stock characters into the fluid and dreamlike regions of psychic interfusion.  In Blithe Spirit, the escapism usually associated with farce turns into something-an occasion for calling upon what is lost or in danger of being lost--that helps explain the hold of this play upon the imagination of Londoners during World War II.  To quote from Hall's notes on her psychical research:  Troubridge "has recently evolved a theory that several people might form part of the same ego, which would account for the occasionally strong ties that sometimes seem inexplicable" (July 6, 1918).  Hall's later practice of dedicating her novels "To Our Three Selves" indicates that she came to accept this belief, and David Lean's departure from Coward's script in the final scene of the film version of the play looks as though he may have been channeling Hall.


            Dellamora's book-length study, Radclyffe Hall, A Life in the Writing, currently in press, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in spring, 2011.  A detailed study of Hall's fiction and nonfiction, published and unpublished, Dellamora devotes extensive coverage to the six-year period during and after World War I when Hall focused on psychical research, lectured, and wrote on her experience as a sitter for Mrs. Leonard.  In 1920, Hall successfully sued a disgruntled founding member of the Society for Psychical Research who had accused her of  being "a grossly immoral woman." 


            The production in Glendale enjoyed the support of a strong cast with Scott Lowell, who appeared for five seasons as Ted Schmidt in Queer as Folk on Showtime, taking the lead as Charles Condomine; Jill Van Velzer as Ruth, and Abby Craden as Elvira.  The decision to place a single intermission in the midst of Act Two resulted in the introduction of a note of frenetic business that may have contributed to the somewhat hectic pace and single-note tone of the remainder of the performance as seen in preview.  Three important reversals occur between the end of Act Two and the end of the third act of Blithe Spirit.  Setting them in a row as part of a single act functioned so as to diminish the impact of each and the cumulative effect of all three.  It's likely that a more flexible tone and varied rhythm will be achieved over the course of the run of the play as part of the fall repertory season of A Noise Within. 


Richard Dellamora

Visiting Scholar, Department of English, UCLA

October 11, 2010


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Sincerely,


Kathy Williams
U.S. West Coast Liaison
The No�l Coward Society