Tuesday-Thursday, February 20-22, 7pm
St. Paul's Church, Cardo 6
$20

Talking Heads, Playreaders - theater

This week’s Playreaders brings us two more of what will now be six of Alan Bennett’s much celebrated Talking Heads, a series of dramatic monologues written for BBC television first broadcast in 1988 and 1998. The series has been produced as a play at the West End Theater in London, in Los Angeles and in New York. and in part as a Masterpiece Theater production on PBS. It has become part of the standard reading syllabus for A levels in English public schools. It features monologues for ten woman (eleven, if you count “a Woman of No Importance” one of tonight’s plays) and two men.

The first piece, “A Cream Cracker Under the Settee”, focuses on the subject of aging and the gradual lose of function and status that insidiously eats away at the foundations of our identity as we age. The piece, an adaptation of Bennett’s original version, is set in Maine.

The second work, A Woman of No Importanc,e offers a poignant illustration of the ways in which, no matter how ordinary our lives, we manage to find consolation in the thought that we are regarded by others as special and necessary.

Bennett is an insightful, poignant writer with the ability to articulate without emphasis or fanfare, the tragic, quietly desperate internal dialogue of seemingly ordinary people. His characters are mesmerizing in their refusal to perceive their circumstance as anything but business as usual. Everything is simply the way it is. Like the three-legged dog, they soldier on, failing to notice that something important is missing.

[Bennett’s] ability to get under the skin of such withdrawn people and write about them with such empathy, compassion and wry (often gallows) humour makes him not just a great writer but the definitive chronicler of a certain kind of English ordinariness, whose outwardly placid surface conceals inner turmoil as intense as anything displayed by the more emotionally articulate.

Michael Brooke, Screenonline

Talking Heads will be presented in the Parish Hall of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Calle Cardo 6, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, February 20, 21 and 22. Lois Reed plays Doris in “A Cream Cracker Under the Settee” and Phoebe Greyson plays Peggy in A Woman of No Importance. Greyson directs. Lou Barranti does lights and sound.

Tickets go on sale at 6:45 each evening, on a first come first serve basis. Doors open at 7:00. Ticket holders must be present at 7:00 when the doors open or their ticket may be resold. The Play commences at 7:30 or earlier if the house is full before that time. Admission is 20 pesos.

Article written by P. Greyson