Greystones Players’ Americana Beauty

Last chance, Texaco…

atest press release from the Greystones Players, issued on Wednesday, May 15th 2024…

Greystones Players invite you to join them for an evening of four powerful one-act plays.

Directed by Aideen Walton, these slices of life in the first half of the last century explore such universal themes as identity, love, loss, the ties that bind us, broken relationships and where we find consolation, all grounded in the soil and culture of rural America and New Orleans.

Every one of Greystones Players’ eleven previous productions sold out, so we recommend booking early to avoid disappointment.

The evening opens with Susan Glaspell’s seminal play, Trifles. First performed by Susan Glaspell herself, along with her Provincetown Players, in 1916, this masterpiece of a play explores themes of identity (constructed or innate), gender, justice and entrapment and the power of silence. Its setting is ‘an abandoned rural farmhouse’ after a mysterious murder has taken place. Two women and three men visit the scene and respond very differently to what they see and find. Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress and is recognised as a pioneering feminist writer and one of America’s first important female playwrights.

Our second play, The Bond by the great American poets Amy Lowell and Robert Frost, adapted by Walter Wykes, is based on three separate stories related by three different women; each woman’s story is interwoven with the others to create a powerful dramatic experience. Walter Wykes, a contemporary American playwright, has had over thirty plays produced across the US and internationally and has received the American College Theater Festival’s Award for Excellence in Playwriting four times.

In Heart in the Ground by Douglas Hill, a young farming couple each struggle in theirindividual ways to cope with a heartbreaking bereavement and the subsequent fallout when both their home and relationship are at risk. Douglas Hill is a playwright, actor and director whose work has been performed both in the US and internationally and has been anthologised by Dramatic Publishing, Heinemann, Smith and Kraus, and Black Box Press.

Tennessee Williams’ Thank You, Kind Spirit was written in 1941 and wasn’t published or produced until nearly twenty years after his death. We find ourselves on the Vieux Carré of New Orleans in a little ‘crib-like room’, the chapel of a spiritualist, Mother DuClos, ‘an octoroon’ (a term used to describe a person who is one-eighth African). As her ‘service’ unfolds, the proceedings are disrupted by an ‘unkind presence’ who has come with an agenda other than to listen to Mother DuClos’ wisdom and revelations. Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), recognized as one of the 20th century’s greatest American playwrights, explored passion with daring honesty and forged a poetic theatre of raw psychological insight that shattered conventional proprieties and transformed the American stage. According to Williams: ‘Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see . . . each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition – all such distortions within our own egos – condition our vision of those in relation to us.’ Please note that a racist and offensive term is used in this play. Suitable for audiences aged 12+.

Playing at The Whale on Thursday, June 13th, Friday 14th, Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th, you can book your tickets for Americana right here.