FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Joyce Linehan for ArtsEmerson, (617) 282-2510, joyce@ashmontmedia.com
ArtsEmerson: The World on Stage
CLOSES ITS INAUGURAL SEASON WITH A PLAY WITHOUT ACTORS OR A STAGE
SUSURRUS
A SENSUAL REINTERPRETATION OF A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
OPENS MAY 20, 2011
High resolution photos available at http://www.ashmontmedia.com/AE_photos_susurrus.html
Press previews will be available on May 18 and 19 ONLY, from 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Please email joyce@ashmontmedia.com and specify whether you would like to attend May 18 or 19, which hour on the hour between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. you would like, and whether you will bring a guest. Available slots are limited by the number of MP3 players we have, so slots will be filled on a first-come first served basis. Pick up location, near the Public Garden, is TBA.
(BOSTON—April 19, 2011) The inaugural season of international theatre programming by ArtsEmerson: The World on Stage closes with the Boston premiere of David Leddy’s Susurrus (soo-SUR-uhs), which opens May 20. Closing date TBA. Tickets are $25, and are on sale now at www.artsemerson.org or by phone at (617) 824-8000. In Susurrus, which doesn’t happen in a traditional theatre, audiences follow a map around Boston’s Public Garden as they listen to the piece, adapted especially for Boston, on MP3 player and headphones. Headphones and MP3 player are supplied. Running time is 1 hour 20 minutes (though it can be paused). Journeys take place between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., leaving at 20 minute intervals, on the hour, 20 minutes past the hour and 40 minutes past the hour. The piece includes about a mile of walking on paved pathways. Umbrellas provided in case of rain. Headphone pickup will be on Boylston St. between Charles and Tremont. Directions will be provided with ticket purchase.
Susurrus is a play without actors and without a stage. It is part radio play, part recital, part lesson in bird dissection, and part stroll in the park. As audiences follow a map around the Public Garden, they listen to the piece on headphones; the different elements form a “perfect melding of location and text to create a theatre experience in which there are no actors and only one member in the audience: you.” (The Guardian) The listener hears snippets about opera, memorial benches, and botany, which fit together into a mournful and poignant story of love and loss that is “a sensual reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a contemporary edge.” (The List)
The maps that audiences read are specially commissioned artworks from highly acclaimed Scottish visual artist Laura Molloy whose work has graced everything from cutting edge fanzines to Belle and Sebastian record covers. Leddy and Molloy closely collaborate on creating a new map of the route for each location by taking visual patterns in railings, benches and paving in the park and transforming them into specially drawn borders and backgrounds for each new map.
In the introduction to the published script of Susurrus, David Leddy writes "The first play I ever saw was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when I was eight years old. I remember nothing about it at all, but have often been told by my mother that, despite being an inherently fidgety child, I sat in mesmerised stillness from beginning to end as if a spell had been cast on me."
Susurrus (the word refers to the rustling sound of wind in trees), is written and directed by David Leddy, a “theatrical maverick” with a “propensity for fearless experiment” (Financial Times) who is “Scotland’s hottest, edgiest young playwright.” (Sunday Times UK)
Recommended for age 16 and older.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Film at ArtsEmerson
To celebrate Susurrus, ArtsEmerson will screen A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a special Library of Congress print. Screenings take place at the Paramount Center, in the Bright Family Screening Room.
Saturday, May 28, 2 p.m. – FAMILY SCREENING
Sunday, May 29, 7 p.m.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Directed by William Dieterle, Max Reinhardt
With James Cagney, Mickey Rooney, Olivia de Havilland, Dick Powell
U.S. 1935, 35mm, black and white, 132 minutes
Influential German theater director Max Reinhardt brings together ballet, classical music, literature, and Expressionist art for this generous Hollywood-by-way-of-Berlin Shakespeare adaptation. One of the studio system’s most sumptuous films, starring a classic Warner Bros. cast and experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, making his childhood debut as an Indian changeling prince. This Library of Congress’ preservation print restores the film to its original length.
Tickets are $10, or $7.50 for members, and are available in advance at www.ArtsEmerson.org, or by calling 617-824-8000. Discounted tickets for seniors are $7.50, and $5 for all students with valid ID and children under 18. Discounted tickets are available in person at the Box Office only. For more information visit www.ArtsEmerson.org.
About David Leddy
David Leddy is an award-winning playwright and director based in Glasgow. He has been described as ‘Scotland’s hottest, edgiest young playwright’ by The Sunday Times, a ‘theatrical maverick’ with ‘propensity for fearless experiment’ by the Financial Times and a ‘site-specific genius’ who is ‘one of the most interesting dramatic writers on the Scottish scene’ and ‘one of Scotland’s leading theatre-makers’ by Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman. Outside Scotland his work has been shown in London, Amsterdam, Milan, Boston, Buenos Aires, Cork and Delhi. Recent prizes include Edinburgh International Fringe Prize, Fringe First and Herald Angel. He was the first person in Scotland to complete a practice-based PhD in theatre. He often makes work in public or unconventional spaces from a glasshouse to a graveyard, from a train shed to a pitch-black cupboard. He aims to create dramatic new writing that draws on elements of site-based performance and experimental live art in order to open up avant-garde performance styles and make them more accessible to new viewers. As well as Susurrus, recent work includes Sub Rosa, a Gothic Victorian promenade piece in disused and derelict spaces backstage at the Citizens’ Theatre; Home Hindrance (co-production with Vanishing Point) where an audience of six moved from room to room in Leddy’s own home, finding a different actor in each room; and the multi-award-wining White Tea where the audience donned white paper kimonos and drank white tea within a cocoon of paper prayer flags and cutting edge technology whilst the play happened around them.
About ArtsEmerson
ArtsEmerson is the organization established by Emerson College to program the Paramount Paramount Mainstage, Cutler Majestic Theatre and other venues at Emerson’s Paramount Center. The inaugural season includes over 100 performances of 18 different productions, including world premieres, Boston debuts and works being developed in the new facilities created by Emerson College. ArtsEmerson, under the artistic leadership of Rob Orchard, will give Boston audiences a new level of cultural choice, bringing professional American and international work to its four distinct venues: the beautifully restored 590-seat Paramount Mainstage; the versatile, intimate Black Box Theatre, which can seat up to 150 people; the state-of the art 170-seat Bright Family Screening Room (all located within the new Paramount Center a cornerstone in the revitalization of downtown Boston); and the beloved, historic 1,186-seat Cutler Majestic Theatre in the heart of the Theatre District, fully restored by Emerson in 2003.
About Emerson College
Located on Boston Common in the heart of the city’s Theatre District, Emerson is the only four-year private college in the United States devoted to communication and the arts. With 3,453 undergraduates and 837 graduate students from across the United States and 40 countries, Emerson is teaching the next generation of leaders in communication and the arts. Supported by state-of-the-art facilities and a renowned faculty, students participate in more than 60 student organizations and performance groups, 15 NCAA teams, student publications, honor societies, television stations including the Emerson Channel, and WERS-FM, the nation’s highest rated student-run radio station. The College is internationally known for its study and internship programs in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., the Netherlands, Taiwan, and the Czech Republic. For more information, visit www.emerson.edu.
