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The Darker Side Of Theatre

Mkleine / Wikimedia Commons / GNU Free Documentation License

Theatre loves an old chestnut. Revivals of audience favorites are a never-ending source of stage entertainment. Playwrights from William Shakespeare to Noel Coward to Tennessee Williams to Neil Simon reliably draw audiences who enter comfortably into the production like putting on a well worn slipper.

But there’s another side to theatre, a more challenging, dangerous side. If you long for modern theatre that takes up provocative themes, here’s something just for you: Fisch Haus Studios is producing a series of contemporary plays, each one performed for one night only, on Thursdays throughout March.

If you missed the earlier productions of plays by Mike Bartlett on March 5th and by David Mamet on March 12th, you still have the opportunity to see The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute on March 19th and Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience on March 26th.

LaBute was famously “dis-fellowshipped” from the Mormon Church after staging his first work, three short pieces he called Bash: a Remembrance of Hatred and Longing. Peter Handke’s prize-winning experimental work was colored with controversy due to his association with Slobodan Milosevic, and when Handke was honored with the International Ibsen Award in 2014, there were calls for the jury to resign.

You can find Fisch Haus Studios in the Commerce Street art district, and experience the stage as a forum for controversy and confrontation on Theatre Thursdays.

Sanda Moore Coleman received an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University in 1991. Since then, she has been the arts and community editor for The Martha's Vineyard Times, a teaching fellow at Harvard University, and an assistant editor at Image. In 2011, she received the Maureen Egan Writers Exchange prize for fiction from Poets & Writers magazine. She has spent more than 30 years performing, reviewing, and writing for theatre.