News
Email
Print
A New Option: Theater company hopes to keep actors working
Jim Freetly Photo
Rebecca Wolf will appear in Dead Man’s Cell Phone, performed by Paper Lantern Theatre Company.
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: July 12, 2009
Times are tough.
Some people might hesitate to start a new theater company now, waiting instead for the economy to improve -- but not the founders of Paper Lantern Theatre Company.
They say they have developed the right niche at the right moment. This is to provide the area's professional actors with a vehicle for honing their craft and to introduce local audiences to challenging, lesser-known works that might not otherwise be staged in the Triad.
The first such work, Sarah Ruhl's Dead Man's Cell Phone, will open Friday on the stage of Winston-Salem Theatre Alliance on Northwest Boulevard.
"It's going to be interesting to see how this flies," said Amy da Luz, one of the company's founding members, who's hoping that the response to Cell Phone will encourage similar efforts in the future.
Cell Phone's cast will engage members of Actors' Equity, a union, in what da Luz described as a "members-project-code" presentation -- meaning that the union actors may appear in the show if there are fewer than 90 seats in the audience and admission is "suggested," as opposed to charged.
Beth Ritson likened the arrangement to the "showcase" presentations she used to do when she was acting in New York from 1988 to 1993. They are needed around here, she said, because without them an Equity actor is limited to roles at Triad Stage and the N.C. Shakespeare Festival.
"That's not enough work," said Ritson, another founding member. "We have families. We can't all travel around" for work.
Da Luz said she wants Paper Lantern to give professional actors more opportunities, whether they are union members or not. She said she is hoping to cast union actors in more shows with nonunion actors -- but that she would need enough money to pay the union actors working under "guest-artist contracts."
Cell Phone, a comedy, is one of the latest works by Ruhl, a playwright who in 2005 became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. It was first staged last year in New York. Mary Louise-Parker, who once studied at UNC School of the Arts, played the leading role, described by New York Times critic Charles Isherwood as an "unexceptional woman who embarks on a loopy odyssey into the lives of others when she inherits -- confiscates, really -- the phone of a stranger she meets in a cafe."
Press materials say that the work is "about how we memorialize the dead -- and how that remembering changes us." It is also "the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world."
"Although the language is sparse, massive things take place within economic language," Ritson said. "There's not one superfluous word in the play."
■ Paper Lantern Theatre Company will present Dead Man's Cell Phone beginning Friday at Winston-Salem Theatre Alliance, 1047 Northwest Blvd. Performances will be at 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday and July 22-25, with 2 p.m. matinees next Sunday and July 26. The suggested admission is $15, with discounts for students and seniors 63 and older; visit www.paperlanterntheatre.com or call 721-1310.
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.
Email
Print
