"The Silver Season" Shines for Theatre Erindale! |
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| [Mississauga ON, June 2015] In 2015-2016, Theatre Erindale will be celebrating the 25th Anniversary of its home base, the Sheridan-UTM Theatre and Drama Studies Program – a professional actor-training partnership still unique in Canada. Recent grads are co-starring in productions that won multiple Dora Awards in Toronto this week – to say nothing of those who are directing, writing, teaching and running theatre companies across the country. So this year the company is planning to make some whoopee! As this is the Silver Anniversary, of course this had to be "The Silver Season".
To celebrate its 25th, Theatre Erindale has planned a line-up so polished that it gleams. First off the block is an extraordinary romp by one of the originators of theatre as we know it, in the doubly extraordinary (and sometimes savagely funny!) new translation by famed Canadian poet Anne Carson. The sequel to Stratford's sell-out Elektra is directed by special guest Autumn Smith. Euripides' Orestes (which sounds like a tragedy but isn’t) runs from October 22nd to November 1st. November 1st is also the date of a special Anniversary Reunion for all those years of graduates. So grads, mark your calendar! And speaking of making whoopee, the annual World Première is about that very thing! Jeff Pearce and Folklore Publishing have granted special permission to adapt their hilarious How to Make Love in a Canoe – and yes, it's about the comical history of copulation in Canada! At the helm of this tipsy vessel will be Theatre Erindale's very own Melissa Jane Shaw (She Shoots, She Scores!). Check it out November 12-22. The company's annual celebration of one-act Independent Student Productions, the Beck Festival from December 10-12, is always like a birthday piñata: you never know what's in store until you crack it open! Then in January, Theatre Erindale joins the recent wave of revivals of plays by Wendy Wasserstein, the brilliant American writer of women's comedies. Swoozie Kurtz, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep starred in the original stage and screen versions of Uncommon Women and Others, about growing up after graduation in the changing world of the 1970s. The all-female cast will be directed by one of the truly great ladies of Canadian theatre, yet to be announced. This year the company's double-take on the golden age of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama has a new umbrella title: "The Blackfriars Project". But this year it will be divided into two separate productions playing half a run each, two weeks apart! Audiences can choose one, choose both, or even – on one special occasion – see both on the same day! Two extraordinary tales set (freely!) in ancient Persia; two families torn apart by storms at sea and reunited only through the intervention of a goddess. But one is Shakespeare's first farce – The Comedy of Errors, directed by David Matheson (A Stitch in Time, Macbeth). And the other is his first Romance – Pericles Prince of Tyre, directed by Patrick Young (Picnic, The Witlings). But that's still not all. The final entry in The Silver Season is a shining landmark of early modern drama by the greatest of Russian playwrights, Anton Chekhov, translated by the greatest of Canadian playwrights, David French. Melee Hutton (The Rover) directs The Seagull. An extended family of artists and would-be artists whiles away the summer by a lake amid tangles of unrequited love. But the leaves are about to fall … Wrote Harold Clurman, "Chekhov is always new, always fresh, and always moving." Theatre Erindale is the best entertainment buy in Mississauga. Season Memberships for the 2015-2016 Silver Season will go on sale in August. The Students and Seniors price is $50 for 5 shows or $60 for all 6 shows; for Regular Adults, it's $75 for 5 shows or $90 for all 6 shows (that's one show FREE!). FREE admission to the Beck Festival is included. Performances run Thursday to Sunday; single tickets are $12 and $18. The campus is well served by transit, and evening and weekend parking is available for $6. For further information or a free colour brochure, call the Erindale Studio Theatre Box Office at 905-569-4369 or visit  |
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