The Luxembourg Chronicle, in collaboration with the Theatre National de Luxembourg (TNL), is offering two FREE tickets to one of the productions of Mister Paradise and Other Rare Electrical Things being performed at the TNL from 7 January 2016. See below on how to enter.
The Theatre National de Luxembourg (TNL, 194 route de Longwy, L-1940 Luxembourg) is putting on six performances of 5 one-act dramas by Tennessee Williams (in English), entitled "Mister Paradise and other rare electrical things" and directed by Luxembourg's Anne Simon, from Thursday 7 January 2015.
His characters are seemingly "just folks", but those simple folks become larger than life, they become poetry, music, they become the American Blues, as the playwright fills them with pain and humour and breathes into them a nobility of spirit. This is the moment where words become theatre, where a universe is created by the simplest of means.
Tennessee Williams, the greatest playwright of the American South, wrote dozens of brief plays throughout his life exploring many themes that dominated his best known works. Anne Simon explores five of the most recently published one-act dramas, all written before achieving recognition for The Glass Menagerie, revealing some of his most poignant and hilarious characters, discovering unsuspected patches of poetic beauty and insight and tracing some new pathways into the lush world of Williams’ imagination. These one-act plays all tell the tales of isolated figures, some of them naïve, some of them just too aware, struggling against a cruel world, torn between the fulfilling of their dreams and a natural inclination to conformism.
The Fat Man’s Wife and Mister Paradise draw certainly the two characters most directly referring to the playwright himself: the first one, young and eager to leave New York in order not to compromise his art, the other, Mister Anthony Paradise, the old, suffering, unknown writer whose true existence will only begin once his earthly self has come to an end, seem opposing, yet complementing forces – like an x-ray look into Williams’ soul. All five of these one-acts give a strong sense of Williams’ courage, his sensitivity to the outsiders of life, his wicked sense of humour, and most of all his compassion without ever turning to the negative.
This collection of plays might be about death and things lost, or never achieved, parents or regimes never contested, as in Why do you smoke so much, Lily or The Municipal Abattoir, but it is all the contrary to a complaint. Life is celebrated against all odds, like in the character of the young, dying charity case Dave in The Big Game: his entourage and himself try to keep the thought of death out of the hospital room for as long as possible.
In all sadness, regret and nostalgia, Williams’ and his characters’ thoughts always motion upwards as Anthony Paradise puts it: The motion of life is upwards, the motion of death is down. Only the blindest of all blind fools can fail to see which is going to be finally – highest up… Life–LIFE.
The production features Steve Karier, Christine Probst-Staffen, Elisabet Johannesdottir and Daron Yates and is being performed at the TNL on Thursday 7 Jan @ 20:00, Saturday 9 Jan @ 20:00, Saturday 16 Jan @ 20:00, Sunday 17 Jan @ 17:00, Thursday 21 Jan @ 20:00 and Friday 22 Jan @ 20:00.
Tickets cost €20 and are available online from www.luxembourg-ticket.lu or by tel: 470895-1 (Mon-Fri 10:00 – 18:30). The evening box office is open 30 minutes prior to each performance.
To apply for your FREE tickets to the TNL production of Mister Paradise and Other Rare Electrical Things in January 2016, please send an email to Geoff@Chronicle.lu with “TNL: Mister Paradise” (without the quotation marks) in the subject line, with your name and mobile number in the body of the email, as well as specifying the performance you would like to attend. The draw will be made at 14:00 on Wednesday 6 January. Winners will be contacted directly. Winning tickets will be available at the venue on the day.
Winner: Sylvie Ewen-Gindt
