Details:
Details: The theatres in Luxembourg-ville are putting on a Tracy Letts Double-Bill in January:
“Un été à Osage County” is in French, with English surtitles on 07 & 08 January 2015 at 20:00 at the Grand Théâtre (Director: Dominique Pitoiset); and “Killer Joe” in English, with French surtitles, on 10, 14 & 15 January 2015 at 19:30 at the Théâtre des Capucins (Director: Anne Simon).
Un été à Osage County (Fr): Tickets €25, €20, €15 (youth €8) from www.luxembourg-ticket.lu; Grand Théâtre
The Weston family patriarch passes away suddenly on a hot summer’s night. Three generations of women find themselves back in the family house in the aftermath of his death; the embittered mother, the cancer-ridden and formidable Violet Weston poisons the reunion, bolstered by her addiction to painkillers. As the weeks roll by in the stifling August heat, family tensions build and murky secrets unfold in this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by Tracy Letts which was successfully made into a film in 2013 earning several Oscar nominations.
Killer Joe (En): Tickets €20, €15, €8 (youth €8) from www.luxembourg-ticket.lu; Théâtre des Capucins
Introduction to the play by Janine Goedert at 19:30 before every performance (in English).
Blackly comic, ferociously violent and blatantly sexual, Letts’ tabloid tale is a slam-bang, obscenity-laced, full-frontal, unapologetically, trailer-trash in-your-face assault with foul-mouthed, dysfunctional characters.
Killer Joe tells the story of Chris Smith, a 22-year-old drug dealer who finds himself in serious debt to the wrong people. He decides to murder his mother, Adele, to collect the $50,000 of insurance money. He has been told by his mother’s boyfriend Rex that the sole beneficiary will be his younger sister Dottie. Assuming Dottie will share the money with him, their father (and also their stepmother), Chris manages to rope his father into a conspiracy to kill his mother in order to get the money. They hire Killer Joe, a police detective – and contract killer in his free time – to get the job done. The plan almost fails when Chris is unable to front Joe’s fee. But Killer Joe takes Chris’s childsister as a retainer against his final payoff which sets in motion a bloody aftermath as the “hit man” meets his match. It all climaxes with Double Indemnity- like twists and turns that go against all expectations.
Letts himself states having been influenced very clearly at the time, mainly by things like Blood Simple, the 1984 noir-style crime film that marked Joel Coen’s directorial debut, and the hardcore pulp fiction of Jim Thompson. On top of that, one could claim that Killer Joe has profound – yet somewhat twisted – echoes of the Cinderella story, in which a young girl dreams of being rescued from her evil stepmother by a Prince Charming. Those three elements: the Noir, the Pulp and the Fairy-tale are all but alien forms to Anne Simon.
The director, who is already familiar with Tracy Letts, directing his Bug in 2009, will be combining those three aesthetic forms in her distopic vision of a desolate, fast-food-addicted and TV-driven society in Killer Joe.
"Set in Dallas, Killer Joe revels in its white trash stereotypes, and gives you permission to do the same; it’s pulp fiction which has it both ways, deriving humor from dirty realism. It’s slick, it’s well constructed, it knows exactly where it’s going." New York Daily News
With Isaac Bush, Elisabet Johannesdottir, Alessija Lause, Milton Welsh, Daron Yates
Venue: Théâtre des Capucins, Luxembourg-ville
Organiser: The theatres in Luxembourg-ville
Price: Tickets €20, €15, €8 (youth €8)
Reservations: Tickets from www.luxembourg-ticket.lu;
URL: www.theatres.lu
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