‘Treasure Isle’ to ‘Out at Sea’ at Guild Hall This Week
It may be the dead of a brutal winter, but the coming week will be a busy one at Guild Hall. A National Theatre Live screening of “Treasure Island,” suitable for ages 10 and up, will happen on Saturday at 8 p.m.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure story of murder, money, and mutiny has been brought to life in a new stage adaptation by Bryony Lavery, a British dramatist, broadcast live from the National Theatre in London. The Observer characterized the production as “astonishing. A remarkable take on Stevenson’s classic.” Tickets are $18, $16 for members.
The John Drew Theater Lab will present free staged readings of two plays on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. — “Night With Guests” by Peter Weiss and “Out at Sea” by Slawomir Mrozek.
Weiss, a German-born playwright and novelist who lived in Sweden from 1939 until his death in 1982, is best known for “Marat/Sade,” which premiered in West Berlin in 1964 and won several awards during its run in New York City, including both the Tony and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle awards for best play.
“Night With Guests” is a little-known one-act allegory that draws on Kabuki, Punch and Judy, and rigid, stylized performances to create a frightening fairy-tale atmosphere reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm. Guild Hall suggests leaving the children at home.
Mrozek was a Polish playwright and cartoonist whose most famous play, “Tango,” from 1965, was called “a modern-day ‘Hamlet’ ” by The Guardian. “Out at Sea” is a macabre comedy in which three men of different classes, who are adrift on a raft, struggle to decide which of them should be eaten first. Bill Burford will direct, with Josh Gladstone, Chloe Dirksen, and Jack Herholdt among the performers.
More free theater will take place next Thursday at 7 p.m., when students from Guild Hall’s Speaking Shakespeare workshop will perform onstage. The program is the culmination of a two-month class in which students ages 16 and up worked on sonnets and monologues and did mask work and scene work. Morgan and Tristan Vaughan, who hold master’s degrees from the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at George Washington University, conducted the workshop.