Backstage at BU: Interplay
A five-part series on the year in drama
Click on the slide show above to listen to actors Marin Ireland and Michael Aranov talk about Mauritius.
Boston University loves drama, from the moodiness of Anton Chekhov to the humor of George Bernard Shaw. The GRS Creative Writing Program’s elite playwriting program has produced some of today’s most successful young playwrights, such as Ronan Noone (GRS’01) and Melinda Lopez (GRS’00), and benefited from decades of partnership with BU’s Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, founded by Derek Walcott, Nobel Prize winning poet and a BU professor, and the Huntington Theatre Company, in residence at Boston University. The 25-year relationship between BU and the Huntington has given one of the country’s best professional companies a performance space and offered BU students an opportunity for hands-on experience.
This week BU Today looked at five shows produced at Boston University in 2006 and 2007, ranging from workshops at the College of Fine Arts to full-scale productions by the Huntington. Click here to see “Making Brendan: Ronan Noone on the Process and the Play.” Click here to see “The Popular Puccini: La Bohème — America’s Favorite Opera — at BU Theatre.” Click here to see “Into The Cherry Orchard: Student Actors Step Up to BU’s Huntington Stage.” Click here to see “Tonight, Tonight: West Side Story Turns 50 at Tsai.”
Interplay: Two Actors Talk About Mauritius
In Mauritius, a Huntington Theatre Company production featured at the Wimberly Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts last fall, the simple sale of a rare postage stamp sets notions of friendship and loyalty spinning in a high-speed blender. When the whirring stops, the only lasting truth is one that applies both to rare stamps and to the play’s five characters: their value increases with the extent of their flaws.
In this slide show, actors Marin Ireland and Michael Aranov talk about the strange mixture of characters created by Pulitzer Prize–nominee Theresa Rebeck and about the common needs that pull them together and set them apart.
"Interplay" first appeared on BU Today in October 2006.