Theatre Wesleyan announces 2007-2008 season

by Shawn Parikh

School is already in session, and Texas Wesleyan University's Theatre Department has revealed the shows they will be presenting this fall and spring:

Laundry and Bourbon & Lone Star from September 19-23, 2007. Both pieces are written by James McClure. Directed by Wesleyan alumni Connie Sanchez & Larry Cure. Laundry and Bourbon and Lone Star are companion plays that reveal the many differences, as well as the similarities, between the sexes and their various responses to growing up. In Laundry and Bourbon, Elizabeth, with her two friends Hattie and Amy Lee, discuss their lives, the decisions they have made, the results, and the futures they face. In Lone Star, Roy, his brother Ray and Cletis (Amy Lee's husband) struggle against the identities they have inherited and the men they want to be. In the Thad Smotherman Theatre.
It's a Wonderful Life: The Live Radio Play from October 19-November 10, 2007, co-presented with the Artisan Center Theater. Adapted by Connie Whitt-Lambert from the film by Frank Capra and the story by Phillip Van Doren Stern. Directed by Joe Brown. Here is the famous movie brought to the stage in the form of a live radio play. All the characters that make this an annual holiday ritual are here to tell the beloved story of George Bailey and family, and how George helps angel Clarence Oddbody to get his wings. At Artisan Center Theater. Purchase tickets online or call the box office at 817-284-1200.
How the Other Half Loves from February 19-24, 2008. Written by Alan Ayckbourn and directed by Brynn Bristol. How The Other Half Loves is an ingenious, funny and brilliantly crafted masterpiece, which juggles time and space to present the lives and loves, passion and panic of three married couples in a play of love and laughter, meals and mayhem. Like all of Ayckbourn's comedies it is about the precise interaction of sex and class in modern English society. Bob Phillip's liaison with his boss's wife is in danger of being discovered by their respective spouses. Each attempt to wriggle out of suspicion by projecting their own infidelity on to a third, totally innocent, uninteresting and unsuspecting couple in the Featherstones. In the Thad Smotherman Theatre.
Little Me from April 10-12 & 17-20, 2008. Music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, and book by Neil Simon. Directed & choreographed by Joel Ferrell. The plot of Little Me tells the rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches, etc. story of Maybelle Schlumfert, an overdeveloped and self-deluded girl who rises to become Belle Poitrine. Throughout the book, Poitrine's character trumpets her successes (which are few) while glossing over her failures (which are many). The book was a stinging parody of the cult of celebrity and self-importance stemming from the numerous "personality overcoming obstacles" biographies of the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the Thad Smotherman Theatre.