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| Rock 'n' Roll, Tony Nominee for Best Play, Opens at Wilma Theater in Philadelphia The Wilma Theater opens its 30th Anniversary Season with the Philadelphia Premiere of the 2008 Tony® nominee for Best Play, Rock ’n’ Roll, by Academy Award®-winner and four- time Tony Award®-winner Tom Stoppard. The Wilma’s production is directed by the theater’s Co-Artistic Director Blanka Zizka, whose 2007-2008 season production of Eurydice was recently nominated for seven Barrymore Awards, including Outstanding Overall Production and Outstanding Direction. For Blanka Zizka and Co-Artistic Director Jiri Zizka, who immigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia after their theater was closed down by the government, Rock ’n’ Roll is a play with deep personal significance. “With half of the play taking place in former Czechoslovakia, Rock ’n’ Roll brings us back to one of the defining moments in our lives when we left the country in 1976,” says Blanka. “The Czech characters in the play encounter events very similar to experiences of our closest friends who remained in Prague. Tom himself was born in Czechoslovakia, and he has long been impressed by our personal story of immigrants coming to a foreign place, knowing nobody, and creating a theater. It is the perfect play to mark our 30th Anniversary Season.” The Wilma has had an artistic relationship with Stoppard for over a decade and has previously produced eight of his plays, including Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favor, Indian Ink, and The Invention of Love. "I'm delighted that my long relationship with The Wilma Theater will be continuing with Rock ’n’ Roll. I feel among friends,” says Stoppard. Hailed by The New York Times as “triumphant” and “arguably Stoppard’s finest play,” Rock ’n’ Roll was a recent hit on Broadway following a record-breaking run in London's West End. The Wilma’s production – the first regional theater production on the East Coast – begins previews on Sept. 17, opens on Sept. 24, and closes on Oct. 26. In 1968, as the world is ablaze with rebellion, Jan, a young Cambridge graduate student with little but a prized collection of rock albums, returns to his homeland of Czechoslovakia just as Soviet tanks are rolling into Prague. Back in England, Jan’s mentor, Max, a professor of Marxist Philosophy, faces his own crisis as the idealism he so strongly held onto smashes against the landscape of political upheaval. Incorporating a playlist of rock music that changed a generation, Stoppard’s epic tale combines history, conflict, and passion, and spans 22 turbulent years, at the end of which, love remains – and so does rock ’n’ roll. From the rise and fall of original Pink Floyd front man Syd Barrett – a recurring figure in the play – to the impact of the underground Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, Rock ’ n’ Roll’s music reflects a revolution with classic recordings from artists such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, and more. Stoppard, who was born Tomáš Straussler, in Zlín, Czechoslovakia, arrived in England in 1946 afterfleeing from the Nazis to Singapore and then to India. While not an autobiographical play, Stoppard does draw from his own experiences and says he identifies with the lead character of Jan. “His love of England and of English ways, his memories of his mother baking buchty [a type of pastry], and his nostalgia for his last summer and winter as an English schoolboy are mine,” he writes in the script’s introduction. Visiting the Wilma last March for a discussion with Blanka at a standing-room-only event, Stoppard said, “There was a time when I thought it would be rather neat to write my fake autobiography as a play. Because I left Czechoslovakia when I was a baby and my Czech father was killed in the Far East in the war, we were [living] in the Far East. And I guess if my mother hadn't – after the war – married… my stepfather, maybe we would have gone back to Czechoslovakia. And for a while I thought it would be quite interesting to write this as a play… about myself as though at the age of eight I'd gone to Czechoslovakia instead of England… Jan is born pretty much close to me in the same little town.” The Wilma produced its first Stoppard play with Travesties in 1994 and developed a long-term relationship with the playwright over the subsequent years. Blanka says, “When Tom was writing Rock ’n’ Roll, he was in contact with Jiri and me, and we had the privilege of reading his first drafts. From the very beginning we made it clear to Tom that we wanted to produce the play at the Wilma.” Tickets are $44 – $60 and are available by calling the Wilma Box Office at (215) 546-7824 or online at www.wilmatheater.org. |

| Philadelphia Theatre Company's Premiere of Wasserstein's Final Play By Andrea K. Hammer For the Philadelphia Bulletin George Widman for GPTMC The Philadelphia Theatre Company (PTC) premiere of the late Wendy Wasserstein's Third will welcome Director Mary B. Robinson back to the area. Formerly the artistic director of the Philadelphia Drama Guild for five years and the associate artistic director of Hartford Stage in Connecticut, Ms. Robinson returns to PTC, where she has directed Three Viewings, Molly Sweeney and This Is Our Youth and Dinner With Friends. Since leaving Philadelphia in 1995, she has lived in Brooklyn while directing and teaching. Some of Ms. Robinson's recent directing credits include Judith Ivey's one-woman show Women on Fire at the Cherry Lane; String Fever at Ensemble Studio Theatre; Jeffrey Hatcher's Three Viewings at Manhattan Theatre Club; revivals of Michael Weller's Moonchildren, Lanford Wilson's Lemon Sky - for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award - at Second Stage; and A Shayna Maidel, which ran for 15 months off-Broadway, as well as many regional productions from Los Angeles Cincinnati. In addition, she has taught for more than 11 years at New York University, where she currently runs the undergraduate directing program; Ms. Robinson has also taught in the graduate program at Brooklyn College for 10 years. "I'm starting to direct more these days," she says. "Now that my son is in high school and much more independent, I'm getting back into the stream a little more." .... READ MORE |


| Symposium Series After the End of History Oct. 20 at 7:30 p.m. Rock ’n’ Roll ends in 1990. The Iron Curtain has fallen, and “the end of history” proclaimed. Has the promise of 1989 been fulfilled in the Czech Republic and Eastern Europe? How did the end of the Soviet Empire contribute to the world we now live in? A panel of noted thinkers examines what has happened in Eastern Europe and the world since that time, and what we might expect in the future. Participants include Benjamin Barber (Jihad Vs. McWorld, and Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy), Trudy Rubin (Foreign Affairs Columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer), and Paul Wilson (Vaclav Havel's translator and a former band member of The Plastic People of the Universe). Body and Soul in Rock ’n’ Roll Oct. 27 at 7:30 p.m. Max: “The brain is a biological machine for thinking…we could make one out of – beer cans.” Eleanor: “I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.” Is the mind merely excitable neurons, an “amazing biological machine” that could be “made out of beer cans” if we understood the technology well enough? Or is it something more? Does the soul have a place in an age of breakthroughs in neuroscience and artificial intelligence? Join us for a provocative discussion featuring panelists including philosopher and neuroscientist Owen Flanagan (author of The Problem of the Soul and The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World), Robert Kurzban (director of Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology), and Joseph LeDoux (author of Synaptic Self and The Emotional Brain). Tickets: Free for all Rock ’n’ Roll ticket-holders; otherwise, $10. Seating is limited. For tickets, call the Box Office at (215) 546-7824, or e-mail tickets@wilmatheater.org. Dates, times, and panelists subject to change. |