 |
Photo by Joan Marcus
|
Eclipse Theatre Company is proud to announce American playwright Rebecca Gilman as the Featured playwright of the 2006 Season. A native of Alabama, Gilman is a resident playwright at the Chicago Dramatists Workshop. Rebecca Gilman's plays include The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, The Glory of Living, and the Goodman Theatre world premieres of Spinning Into Butter, Boy Gets Girl, and Blue Surge. Her plays have also been produced at the Lincoln Center Theatre in New York, Royal Court Theatre in London, the Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, Manhattan Class Company, as well as other theaters around the country and abroad. She received her M.F.A. in playwriting from the University of Iowa in 1991. Chicago Tribune Arts Critic Chris Jones has said of Gilman that "she writes plays with such intriguing plots that the audience finds itself hungry for what is going to happen next-and once she has the viewer under that narrative spell, she does not shirk from exposing complex themes with a strongly feminist sensibility, dispensed with just the right quirky touch of nouveau Southern gothic."
Download the 2006 season brochure 
|
|
Productions
Directed by Nathaniel Swift
March 17th - April 23rd, 2006
at the Victory Gardens Theater
The Rebecca Gilman season begins with the Midwest premiere of one of her newest works. The Sweetest Swing in Baseball follows the story of Dana Fielding, a successful artist whose latest exhibition flops along with her personal life. To dig her self out of her crisis, she is admitted to a psychiatric hospital and seeks inspiration from the unlikeliest of sources - the bad boy of America's favorite pastime, Darryl Strawberry.
Directed By Anish Jethmalani
July 21 - September 3, 2006
at the Victory Gardens Theater
2257 N. Lincoln Ave. Chicago
The Gilman season continues in the summer of 2006 with Spinning into Butter. Named one of Time Magazine's best new plays of 1999, "Spinning into Butter" revolves around a small, mostly white liberal arts New England College where finger pointing begins after an African-American student receives racially motivated hate mail. The newly appointed Dean of Students struggles to defuse the whirlwind of emotions that begins to spread like wildfire in the community and on campus
November 3 - December 17, 2006
at the Victory Gardens Theater
2257 N. Lincoln Ave. Chicago
Theresa Bedell is a successful reporter in New York who loves her work and the life she has made for herself. A relationship with a man would complete the picture and so she agrees to go on a blind date with a friend of a friend. Tony is attractive and funny, but Theresa isn't sure, and after a second date she's convinced they have nothing in common and sees no point in continuing the relationship. Tony, though, thinks otherwise. What at first seems like persistence on his part grows into obsession, and Theresa's annoyance with Tony turns to terror as he begins to threaten her and those around her. Ultimately, Theresa must fight to save herself from being erased by Tony's actions?actions which call into question the assumptions at the very heart of romantic pursuit. "In Boy Gets Girl, Rebecca Gilman offers up a tale of Gotham singledom you won't be seeing any time soon on 'Sex and the City.' A disturbing chiller about a woman whose life of accomplishment is quickly destroyed by a disturbed admirer, the play works powerfully at its most basic level, as a suspenseful tale about the unraveling of a strong woman's sense of security in the urban jungle. It certainly will touch a tender nerve in everybody who's ever squirmed through a creepy blind date?" (Variety).
|
