Curtain Times

Thursdays & Fridays
8:30 P.M.

Saturdays
3 P.M. & 8:30 P.M.

Sundays
2 P.M. & 7:30 P.M.

Last season the Repertory produced a widely acclaimed production of John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitizer Prize winning play Doubt. This season the Rep returns with a production of the second play in his projected trilogy, Defiance, A Marine Corp base is run by Colonel Littlefield who only sees “black, white, blue or stupid.” He sees Marines and he sees the racial unrest as a Marine unity problem. He hopes that Captain King, an African American will help him fix this problem and this will give Littlefield a chance for his one last promotion. When Colonel Littlefield invites the black officer to his home to discuss the building tensions, unexpected and profound events turn the discourse from race to an even deeper exchange that touches the heart and soul of all involved.

It is sad and ironic that the great American playwright, August Wilson died only days before his final play, Radio Golf, received it’s world premiere. Ironic because his life and his tenth play marked the end of his 20th century decade by decade depiction of the state of African American life in America.

Harmond Wilks has more on his agenda than simply becoming Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor. He has ambitious plans for urban renewal. Harmond questions the obliteration of the past. But, there is no such question in his business partner’s mind. Roosevelt Hicks is a vice-president in a local bank and he is primarily motivated by the money to be made. That is why he plays golf with white business men. Unsurprisingly, Wilks and Hicks become embroiled in deep conflict.

Finding The Burnett Heart is about a family coping with difference. For Tyler Burnett it’s hard enough just being a teenager, without suddenly having to share your room with your dying eighty year old grandfather, a man who seems to base his entire life on making others miserable.

During one of their exchanges tempers flair and their lives are changed forever. Tyler, in anger at this grandfather’s dictatorial edicts, forces the old man to face the fact that his first son and namesake, Jimmy, was, before his death, actually gay. In reaction to the old man’s rampant homophobia, Tyler defends his uncle Jimmy and inadvertently “outs” himself. Suddenly, Tyler’s entire support system is pulled from beneath him.

The year is 1989. The Berlin Wall is falling. But Samuel Isaacson, the title character of Last Days of a Translator does not see jubilation; he sees only ashes.

A Polish-born Holocaust survivor who once was a promising writer, Mr. Isaacson lives in New York City and works for an import-export company. He spends his days translating letters from Europe about men’s and women’s underwear, his nightssitting in his apartment listening to the earth-shaking news from Berlin. When a young man of German-descent is hired by his employer to work with Mr. Isaacson, the old man is overwhelmed by the ghosts of his tortured past. The relationship the two men carve out is by turn funny, sad, tumultuous, and ultimately life-affirming.