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'Thought-provoking' play about finding hope amid a dreary existence opens at Thorneloe tonight

Theatre promises an 'immersive theatre experience' with Jim Cartwright's 'Road'
thornloe
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Thorneloe University presents its production of “Road” starting tonight (Oct. 26).

A press release calls the play “thought-provoking,” said said it “will engage and actively involve audiences like never before.”

The play, by English dramatist Jim Cartwright, is “an immersive theatre experience” featuring Thorneloe Theatre Arts students, with design and technical by Cambrian College’s Theatre Arts – Technical Production students.

Cartwright, who is also the author of “Two” and “The Rise and Fall of Little Voice,” hammers home two key facts: Life is long. Life is hard. 

Set in Lancashire, United Kingdom, “Road” depicts a rundown, past its prime northern town – scruffy and depressed, but laced with hope. Sound familiar?

The town’s inhabitants compel us to look beyond their socially and emotionally miserable lives into what makes them move forward; how they manage to survive their drug and booze driven existence. Cartwright’s characters ask, “why is the world so hard,” and “who’s to blame: me, us, them or God?” 

Finding no answers, the people in the town show us how and why they go on. How they find hope in the bleak greyness that characterizes their lives.

Sad and funny, angry and courageous, the play screams at the indignity that results from chronic unemployment and suggests that we find our escape in our own way —  through our imagination. 

It intimates that in the end, perhaps the dream of escape is more important than the fact that the reality of escape is unlikely: that “somehow a somehow a somehow we might escape.” 

After all, our lives are written in the everyday exchanges between neighbours and friends — exchanges that uplift us, encourage us, and ultimately help us to see past the mundane, to see beauty and truth, to find hope.

This challenging theatre production will wake up your senses and will jolt you awake and have you moving in and around the set, which takes up the entire Ernie Checkeris Theatre. 

Directed by Patricia Tedford, Associate Professor and Chair of the Theatre & Motion Picture Arts program at Thorneloe – this event is like no other at this venue. 

The action is intimate, with the action sometimes taking place over the heads of the audience members or a metre or two away from them. 

This represents a new kind of acting challenge for Thorneloe’s theatre students, and a new design and lighting challenge for its Cambrian partners.

The unique design of the set will mean that seating will be limited to 50 persons per night. 

The show runs Oct. 26 and 27 and Nov. 1-3 at 8 p.m. Tickets cost $20 for adults, $10 for seniors and students. Visit thorneloetheatre.eventbrite.ca or phone 705-673-1730, ext. 0.


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