AMERICAN THEATRE | This Month in Theatre History

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AMERICAN THEATRE | This Month in Theatre History


October 1892 (130 years in the past)

Broadsheet of a efficiency by Lavinia Warren on the Lobero Theatre.
Portrait of Lavinia Warren by Matthew Benjamin Brady.

Billed as “Mrs. General Tom Thumb (Countess Magri) and the Lilliputians,” Lavinia Warren appeared on the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Oct. 19, 1892. She arrived on the stage bejeweled, decoratively dressed and transported in an ornate carriage led by groomed mini-horses, and, for the night’s leisure, she and her troupe carried out a sequence of skits and scenes. By this time, at 51 years of age, Lavinia had been a performer for over 35 years of her life. Due to a uncommon genetic situation, she had stopped rising in early childhood and stood at a heigh of about 32 inches. In her teenagers, she was recruited by P.T. Barnum and shortly turned a sensation internationally. She and her first husband, Charles Stratton, carried out collectively for years, traversing the world with their act and even acquired an invite to the White House by President Abraham Lincoln after their marriage. A couple of years following Charles’ loss of life in 1883, Lavinia married the musician Count Primo Magri, and collectively they created and toured with their new firm of “the Lilliputians.” Lavinia Warren remained a performer late into her life and handed away in 1919.

October 1972 (50 years in the past)

The Indiana Repertory Theatre opened their doorways on the Athenaeum in Indianapolis with a manufacturing of Brandon Thomas’s farce Charley’s Aunt. The manufacturing was directed by one of many founders of the Theatre, Edward Stern. Stern had met his fellow co-founders of the theatre, Benjamin Mordecai and Gregory Poggin, after they had been all graduate college students at Indiana University. Together the crew put collectively a plan for a repertory theatre firm and shopped numerous cities throughout the nation to take up residence by sending letters of curiosity to greater than 90 U.S. mayors. The metropolis of Indianapolis confirmed essentially the most enthusiasm for a brand new theatre and simply occurred to be the closest locale to the three collaborators. Charley’s Aunt, which opened on Oct. 18, 1972, set the theatre on an inventive path has sustained for greater than 50 years. In 1980, the theatre moved to its present dwelling on the Indiana Theatre, mere steps from the Indiana State Capitol.

October 1987 (35 years in the past)

Myra Carter and Madeleine Potter in ‘Abingdon Square,’ 1987.

María Irene Fornés directed the premiere of her personal work Abingdon Square on the American Place Theatre for the Women’s Project. The play follows Marion, a teenaged girl married to a a lot older man, and explores the strictures girls face in home life. When Marion matures and embarks on an intimate affair that threatens her household commitments, the results pressure her to look at her sexual self alongside her social and familial obligations. Critics admired the textual content and Fornés’ directing. Mel Gussow, in an Oct. 17 New York Times evaluate, mentioned that, in her directing, “Ms. Fornes has come closest to realizing her intention as a playwright.” The work acquired the 1988 Obie award for Best New American Play.

October 1982 (40 years in the past)

Over Easy, or Las aventuras del Huevo, the primary manufacturing of Teatro Meta, premiered on the University of California San Diego’s Mandeville Center Auditorium. The devised manufacturing by Stephen Most, dramaturg Felipe Zatarain, administrators William Virchis and Dr. Jorge Huerta, and the forged explored migration to San Diego’s Barrio Logan from Mexico in a comedic and heartfelt new work. Teatro Meta, the brainchild of administrators Virchis, Huerta, and Craig Noel, government producer of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, served as an early incubator for bilingual playwriting and training on the Old Globe. Later Virchis and Huerta would collaborate to discovered Teatro Máscara Mágica in 1989, a multicultural theatre additionally situated in San Diego County, now getting into its thirty third 12 months.

October 2002 (20 years in the past)

Marga Gomez and Carmelita Tropicana in ‘Single Wet Female.’

A moist, wild, and bizarre new work by efficiency artist/comedians Carmelita Tropicana and Marga Gomez premiered at Performance Space 122 in New York. Single Wet Female—borrowing its identify and fundamental central plot from the 1992 movie Single White Female—has a white, blonde femme girl (Gomez) wanting a brand new roommate and getting far more than she bargained for when a butch, dark-haired Latina stranger (Tropicana) strikes in. Where the movie titillates with refined homoeroticism, Single Wet Female spit on subtlety in a piece that challenged heteronormativity, the male gaze, and whiteness, whereas being hilarious and Hitchcockian all on the similar time. Following the New York efficiency, the work toured throughout the United States, with stops in Austin and San Francisco.

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