More Information About Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville

Description

The Brick Theater, Inc.
presents
a Gemini CollisionWorks production of

Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville

Before he became known as the writer-director-designer of his groundbreaking and legendary abstract stage spectacles, Richard Foreman was seen as a promising playwright in a more, shall we say, traditional mode, writing “normal” plays with standard structures, characters, settings, and events, unlike those that he was to become known for from 1968 onward.   In 1966, he wrote Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville, which came very close to having a Broadway run with Vincent Gardenia in the eponymous role (though Foreman had hoped for Alec Guinness in the role – that of a large, manic, Bronx-born, Jewish New Yorker, which is a hint to the creative conflicts that kept the show from being staged at that time). 

This “boulevard comedy” as Foreman calls it (he also compares it, accurately, to the 1960s plays of Murray Schisgal) remained unseen for over 30 years, until Foreman gave it to director/actor Ian W. Hill  in 1999, for the third of the No Strings Attached festivals of Foreman’s plays that Hill produced at the Nada spaces on Ludlow Street, saying that the part of Harry was a good one for Hill to play and he should do the show – which he did, to appreciative audiences and excellent reviews, for a very short run, the only run this obscure work has ever had.   Now, Harry in Love is back, with half of the cast of the ’99 production, for a slightly-longer run in a slightly-larger production.  

The plot?  Harry Rosenfeld is a big, neurotic, unnerved and unnerving man who believes his wife, Hilda, is planning to cheat on him (and he seems to be right). His response: drug her coffee and keep her knocked out until her paramour goes away. The plan works about as well as should be expected and, over several days, a number of people – the paramour, a doctor, Hilda’s brother, and an “innocent” bystander - are sucked into Harry's manic, snowballing energy as it becomes an eventual avalanche of (hysterically funny) psychosis.

While we’re probably lucky and much better-off to have the Foreman we’ve had, it’s fascinating to see this (extremely funny) play which very well might have meant a very different career for Foreman if it had made in to Broadway. It's not what you probably know from him, but it still sounds like the Richard Foreman anyone would know from his later work – almost any line from this play, out of context, would not sound at all out of place in one of his later, abstract plays. Really.  

The cast of this production is Walter Brandes*, Josephine Cashman*, Ian W. Hill, Tom Reid, Ken Simon*, and Darius Stone*.
Written by Richard Foreman
Directed by Ian W. Hill

About the Ticket Supplier: The Brick Theater

The Brick and its company, The Brick Theater, Inc., were founded in 2002 by Robert Honeywell and Michael Gardner. Formerly an auto-body shop, a yoga center, and various storage spaces, this brick-walled garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was completely refurbished as a state-of-the-art performance space.

The Brick has been home to many critically acclaimed premieres, including Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Bizarre Science Fantasy, Tupperware Orgy, In a Strange Room (based on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying), Dear Dubya, Fallout Follies, World Gone Wrong, My Year of Porn, Who Is Wilford Brimley?, Jenna Is Nuts, Habitat, Absence of Magic, Assyrian Monkey Fantasy (in two movements), and The Pragmatists.

The Summer Theme Festival Series presented The Hell Festival in 2004, The Moral Values Festival in 2005, The $ellout Festival in 2006, and continues with The Pretentious Festival in Summer 2007. In addition, The Brick has also produced a short-works program called Brick-a-Brac, a collection of holiday-themed one-act plays known as The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee, and the hugely successful New York Clown Theatre Festival (the first of its kind in New York in more than 20 years).