Two tickets to any show before June 2009 at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. 

TROJAN BARBIE – World Premiere

by Christine Evans – directed by Carmel O’Reilly

“There is no life in another country. You’ll always be a foreigner, stuck on the wrong side of the looking-glass.” — Trojan Barbie

Lotte Jones, a doll repair expert, needs a vacation. She books herself on a cultural tour for singles and travels with them to modern-day Troy, where she finds more of a change of scene than she’d bargained for – she's in the midst of an attack by the Greek army threatening to destroy the last fragments of a mighty civilization.

Part contemporary drama, part homage to Euripides’ Trojan Women, Trojan Barbie tells the perpetually moving tale of Priam’s widow, Hecuba, and her defenseless family, recast against the vivid reality of modern warfare.  Poetic, compassionate, and tinged with great warmth and humor, Trojan Barbie is an epic war story with a most unlikely heroine, who always looks on the bright side even as past and present collide about her.  Carmel O’Reilly, director of Sugan Theatre’s St. Nicholas that A.R.T. presented in 2000, joins the Company for the first time to direct this imaginative work.

ROMANCE

by David Mamet – directed by Scott Zigler  

“A joy…a fiesta of forbidden laughter…a giddy, glorious, bad-taste valentine…. The most skillfully constructed farce since Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.”
— Newsday

It’s hay fever season, and in the courthouse a judge is popping antihistamines like candy. The case unfolding before him involves a motley bunch of chauvinists and eccentrics, attorneys and clients alike, whose petty prejudices threaten to unravel the legal process. And then the defendant, who is either a chiropodist or a chiropractor, lands on an ingenious way to bring peace to the Middle East…

If you think you know David Mamet, think again. This famously terse playwright has reinvented himself as a master of farce. Romance is a courtroom comedy that takes no prisoners in its quest for total political incorrectness.

Masterfully wielding the language of the courtroom, David Mamet creates a world in a microcosm in which shameless fawning and sheer caprice hold sway, and the noble apparatus of law and order degenerates into riotous mayhem. Mamet-veteran Scott Zigler (Copenhagen, The Old Neighborhood, The Cripple of Inishmaan) directs this sublimely vicious comedy.

May 9–31
Loeb Drama Center