Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Cart/Horse Theatre will present the Toronto Premiere of Olivier Award-winning playwright Conor McPherson’s This Lime Tree Bower, a daring and darkly comic tale of three men’s fantastic crime, booze, and sex-fuelled escape from their mundane lives in the suburbs of Dublin. The Cart/Horse production, directed by Toronto theatre veteran Sarah Dodd, will run upstairs at the Berkeley Street Theatre, Dec 7-22.
This Lime Tree Bower was first produced in 1995 and was one of McPherson’s early hits, with massive critical success including winning the Royal National Theatre Ingenuity Award. The show is presented as three monologues that seem disconnected at first but are slowly revealed to tell a larger single story.
Cart/Horse artistic director Matt Gorman plays Frank, an aimless 20-year-old whose plan to save the family fish-n-chipper by robbing a local loan shark drags his younger brother Joe and their sister’s rakish boyfriend Ray into a wild weekend of debauchery and temporary escape. Meanwhile 17-year-old Joe, played by newcomer Anthony MacMahon, can barely see the bleak future in front of him for all his pent-up sexual urges, and finds himself caught up in a sordid sexual adventure of his own when he’s swept up by the devilish charms of a classmate. And Shaw Festival star Gray Powell plays Ray, a university professor whose drunken affairs with his students lead him into increasingly risky situations.
Director Sarah Dodd says she wants to give the audience the same thrill of escape the young men in the show feel.
“I want the audience to walk away thinking about that we ourselves are the only people who can change the parts of our lives that we are unhappy with,” she says. “These three men are unhappy and one of them finally gets the courage to do something about it. It may be against the law, it may be considered dangerous, but he gets away with it and it’s a lot of fun to find out to hear how he did it.”
Cart/Horse Theatre is a company dedicated to telling stories that build connections between actors and audiences.
“McPherson’s writing fits pretty perfectly into our vision of an actor-and-story-driven company. Not just these monologue plays, but all of his material is character-based instead of premise-based like a lot of other writers,” says Gorman.
Gorman, a Halifax native, selected the script for its unique take on the modern man.
“There’s also, for me personally, this interesting quality of what I'll call ‘male sadness’ that is a unique, maybe Irish, maybe east coast Canadian sentiment that I don't find in a lot of other writers. He lets these men feel very deep emotions, but present them in a way that is unsentimental and true to their personalities,” he says.
This Lime Tree Bower is the first play in Cart/Horse’s 2012-13 “Fight or Flight” season. The next show will be Eirlys and Eckhart, an original play by Toronto playwright Arlin Dixon, on at the Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace from Mar 6-16.
WHAT: This Lime Tree Bower by Conor McPherson (Toronto Premiere)
WHO: Director: Sarah Dodd
Starring: Gray Powell, with Matthew Gorman and Anthony
MacMahon
Designer: Lindsay Anne Black Lighting: Kevin Hutson
Stage Manager: Gillian Lewis
WHERE: Berkeley Street Theatre (upstairs) – 26 Berkeley Street
WHEN: Preview Thurs, Dec 6; Runs Dec 7-22
TICKETS: $25; Mondays and Preview $10; available soon at
MORE INFO: http://carthorsetheatre.com
Photo: Gray Powell, Matt Gorman, and Anthony MacMahon. ©2012 Scott Gorman.
2012-10-12
Toronto: Cart/Horse Theatre will present the Toronto premiere of Conor McPherson’s “This Lime Tree Bower”