Mooney on Theatre is giving away tickets to Alumnae Theatre’s Production After Mrs. Rochester on Thursday, September 29 at 8:00PM at Alumnae Theatre, 70 Berkeley Street, Toronto.
To be entered into the draw for a pair of tickets just send an email to contests@mooneyontheatre.com with the subject line “After Mrs. Rochester contest” by NOON on Wednesday, September 28, 2011.
See below for details about show, how the contest works:
Jean Rhys (1890 – 1979) was a troubled, Caribbean-born chorus girl turned writer who strongly identified with a fictional counterpart – Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife in Charlotte Brontë‘s classic 1847 novel Jane Eyre. In 1966, after decades of silence, Jean Rhys produced her masterpiece, a Jane Eyre prequel titled Wide Sargasso Sea told from the perspective of Rochester’s unhappy West Indian bride. British playwright Polly Teale’s labyrinthine drama interweaves the demons haunting Jean with her fictional obsession to explore their toll on the writer’s stormy life. Alumnae Theatre Company is very proud to present the Canadian premiere of After Mrs. Rochester.
Polly Teale, the co-Artistic Director of Shared Experience Theatre in Oxford, England read Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea while researching for a stage adaptation of Jane Eyre (which premiered in 1997). The more she read of Rhys’ other novels, the more she was “struck by the parallels between her own story and that of Mr. Rochester’s mad wife – the woman who would become the heroine of Jean’s late masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea …Jean felt a desire to rewrite Mrs. Rochester’s story, to tell it from the beginning. To tell it from the inside.”
Laura Roald, who directed Closer for Alumnae Theatre in 2008, looks at the play After Mrs. Rochester as the story of Jean Rhys “ripping the novel Wide Sargasso Sea from her very skin”. Roald notes that “working with an all-female cast allows the production to explore the hauntings from a personal perspective – Jean Rhys wrote with a deeply personal voice, and each emotional echo is an aspect of her own experiences. Cross-gendering the roles allow us to maintain that voice while still examining the raw pain of her life journey.”
The set design, conceived by the director, suggests outlines of mountains and doors, pulling together the disparate worlds of the lush landscape of Dominica and the stuffy cloister of Jean’s little writing room. A single space transforms to dozens of locations, and still remains a closed attic room. Paul Hardy‘s lighting incorporates the rich and sensual as well as the humid and shadowy. Megan Benjafield‘s atmospheric soundscape weaves throughout the fluid time shifts.
Alumnae Theatre Company’s production of After Mrs. Rochester features Susan Q Wilson as Jean Rhys, Jessica Rose as Ella (her younger self), with Julie Burris, Keriece Harris, Laura Jabalee, Tabitha Keast, Tina McCulloch and Laine Newman as various characters (real and fictional) who haunted Jean’s life and memories – including Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester, and Bertha Rochester.
Details
Running Time: Approximately 2hrs including one intermission.
Opening Night: Friday September 23, 2011
Performance Dates: Friday September 23 – Saturday October 8, 2011
Schedule: Wednesday – Saturday 8:00pm; Sunday matinee at 2:00pm
There will be a talkback with cast and director after the matinee on October 2
Tickets: Wednesday 2-for-1; Thursday, Friday & Saturday $20; Sunday PWYC
Location: Alumnae Theatre, 70 Berkeley Street, Toronto
Box Office: 416-364-4170 (box 1) or e-mail reservations@alumnaetheatre.com.
Box Office opens one hour prior to each performance.
Please note: Box Office does not accept credit or debit cards.
Photo Credit: Photo by Dahlia Katz www.dahliakatz.com
Contest Rules:
- The only acceptable form of entry for the contest is by email, sent to contests@mooneyontheatre.com (Mooney on Theatre will never use your email address for anything other than to reply to the specific contest you entered, and we certainly would never sell it or anything like that)
- Entrants must be available on the day and time listed in the contest. The tickets are available for that showing only, and cannot be transferred to another date.
- The winning entrants will be chosen by a random drawing.
- Winners will be notified by email by 9pm on the day of contest closing and need to confirm their attendance 10am AT THE LATEST the following morning so that their names can be given to the theatre company for tickets to be set aside.
- Photo I.D. may be required to claim the winning tickets.
- Tickets must be picked up 60 to 30 minutes before show time at the venue box office. The box office reserves the right to release any tickets not picked up 15 minutes before show time.
- We ask that all winners provide us with a quick blurb on what they thought of the show, either in the comments section of the review once it’s been posted on Mooney on Theatre.
I saw this play on Saturday and it is just superb. The play moves between various stories, times and places and the director handles it all with ease. The acting was fabulous and I loved the women in men’s roles. This is a play that requires your attention but you will be well rewarded. Go see it.