|
|
|
Resident Artists and Theater Companies: Michigan Classical Repertory Theatre Some of our friends and colleagues: Ypsilanti Downtown Development Authority Ypsilanti Convention and Visitors Bureau Ann Arbor Area
|
Riverside Arts Center, Spring, 2007, Newsletter A Washtenaw Community College benefit for the RAC:
A comedy murder mystery by the WCC Performance Arts Department Drama/Theatre and Student Activities Drama Club. Produced by Tracy Komarmy, directed by Ron Miller, technical direction by Barry LaRue. All actors and crew are students at WCC. Ticket prices are $15 general admission and $10 for students and seniors. What fun! Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound is often on actors’ lists as one play in which it’s the most fun to be an actor. Clearly the structure of the play within a play and the overly melodramatic internal murder mystery make it both entertaining and challenging for the actor. The WCC cast was no exception as they have enjoyed the challenges and sheer fun of the action and, as is true of most Stoppard plays, the language. Stoppard himself is clear to point out that there is nothing terribly deep about Hound or at least one shouldn’t make too much of it, but there is the continual play with language. Stoppard is a master. The Real Inspector Hound follows two theatre critics who are watching a ridiculous set-up of a country house murder mystery, in the style of a “whodunit.” By accident, they become involved in the action using a series of events that parallel the play they are watching. Stoppard is an iconoclast Stoppard was born Tom Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) on July 3, 1937. When he was two years old, his family fled from the Nazis to Singapore where his father, a company physician, was killed at the start of World War II. Stoppard and his mother lived in India for the duration of the war and then moved to England in 1946. There she wed Major Kenneth Stoppard of the British Army. Tom assumed his stepfather’s surname. Tom Stoppard’s earliest writing was as a newspaper journalist after he quit school at the age of seventeen. He began writing his first plays in the 1960s with A Walk on the Water and won his first critical acclaim with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1965. Since then he has written many television scripts, radio plays, short stories, film scripts (including Brazil , The Russia House, Billy Bathgate, and Empire of the Sun ) and over forty plays. Stoppard’ s latest success was The Invention of Love . This opened to rave reviews at the Royal National Theatre in 1997 and is destined for London’s West End this year. Stoppard is considered to be a master of comic invention, visual humor, and remarkably witty wordplay. He uses his considerable skills to investigate philosophical questions in an extremely entertaining manner. Since 1977 Stoppard has become concerned with a number of human rights issues and he has been active in Amnesty International.
|
No contemporary playwright has been as successful as Tom Stoppard in creating what have been termed “serious comedies”––funny plays that deal with important ideas. His efforts have been recognized and rewarded with many awards for playwriting, including three Tonys on Broadway. He has received quite a number of honorary degrees and this past year he was honored with a knighthood in the United Kingdom.