When Henry D. Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax one year in protest of the Mexican-American War, he was thrown in jail for the night. Built around the hard fact of the great woodsman's musings to the vagrant who shares his cell, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail expands into a full picture of the man more accurate, perhaps, than the picture he gives of himself in Walden. Though the other characters in Thoreau's life, included in flashbacks, help integrate the pieces of his philosophy into the play, the strength of the Kirkland House production should lie in the simple, almost rustic way it handles the funny little things that can happen to anyone. Performances are in the Kirkland JCR tomorrow through Sunday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $2 at the Holyoke Center Box Office or at the door.
The border country of life on the physical edge of town becomes the border of accepted society which contributes in turn to the border of love and hate between lonely and alcoholic mother and her daughters in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds. A girl who wins a big science prize at school wants her mother to come to the award ceremony but the mother who, with her strange ways has never worked for the acceptance of the community, is ashamed. And so, in the Winthrop House production, the fierce battle for independence and pride against pride and love begins. Performances are tomorrow and Saturday and also next weekend at 8 p.m. in the Winthrop JCR. Tickets are $2.
Pirates and Pinafore may attack the great weakness for duty shared by all Victorians but Patience goes straight for the Achilles' heel of a minority. In this less well known Gilbert and Sullivan satire it is the aesthetes who so carefully buttoned their sleeves in the last half of the last century who are being so obviously but fondly mocked. Bunthorne, the hero, is a parody of Oscar Wilde or Swinburne; Patience is the name of the simple village milkmaid he adores. In the G & S society spring production, director P.D. Setlzer should put the cute couplets, scores of lovesick maidens and happy endings to good use. Performances are at the Agassiz Theater in Radcliffe Yard tonight through Sunday and also next weekend at 8 p.m. Tickets are $2 and $3 on weekdays, $2.75 and $3.75 on weekends, and are available at the Holyoke Center ticket office or on rush at the door.
At the center of the new Adams-Quincy House production of A Mid-summer Night's Dream is the lush poetry of Shakespeare and images of reverie and nightmare woven together carefully, like a speall. In Titania's bower, the faries who also appear as courtiers in the opening coreographed scenes and set the eerie tone of the show, develop insect-like personalities. And in a long, wicked laugh, the dark underside of Puck is revealed. The elaborate production has been weaved together by the people who brought The Beggar's Opera to Adams House last year. In the stage's flood of dark blue light, lie back and be wooed. Performances continue tonight through Saturday at 8:15 p.m. in the Quincy House dining room. Tickets are $2.50.
The scandal of London in the 1920s was the young poet Edith Sitwell. She paraded around dressed in exotic costumes and wearing gigantic sapphires on her fingers. She wrote positively outrageous poetry and she went around discovering other poets, like Dylan Thomas, who were even more scandalous than herself. Facade, now playing at the Loeb, is the effective staging of Sitwell's previously unstageable poetry set to the sparkling music and witty and irreverent dance parodies of the young William Walton. The action, wild enough at its first performance in 1923 to have the fire department be called in, takes place, more or less, in a crumbling Edwardina hotel by the sea. Performances continue tonight and run through Saturday at the Loeb Mainstage. Tickets are $3 and $4 and can be bought at the Loeb box office.
