08/01/2019
Theatre on Fire announces its October production at CWT!
You cannot turn on the news these days without hearing about refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants and the varying responses from governments all over the world. In the US, we see and hear of deplorable conditions at detention centers, families torn asunder, and children dying - all in the name of "border protection." Playwright Harold Pinter was a fierce opponent of state abuse of prisoners, writing several plays on this theme (including our 2008 production of One for the Road.)
When Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest honor for any writer in the world, the Chairman of the Swedish Academy said that Pinter was an artist who “forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms." His biographer, Michael Billington, said Pinter "remain[ed] to his credit, a permanent public nuisance, a questioner of accepted truths, both in life and art."
In that spirit, we are thrilled to announce our Fall production: MOUNTAIN LANGUAGE, by Harold Pinter, directed by Darren Evans. Set in a detention center where the inmates are forbidden to speak their own language, the play evokes, in four short scenes, a shocking awareness of the terror, brutality and inhumanity which can occur when the rights of the individual have been usurped by an all-powerful and oppressive state. Mountain Language runs October 4-19 at the Charlestown Working Theater.
