Theatre News

Tricycle Stages British Premiere of Tiny Kushner

Theo Bosanquet
London's West End Off-West End

In September the Tricycle Theatre will stage the British premiere of the Guthrie Theater/Berkeley Repertory Theater production of Tiny Kushner, a collection of five one-act plays written by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner.

Running from 3 to 25 September 2010 (previews from 1 September), Tiny Kushner is directed by Berkeley Repertory’s artistic director Tony Taccone, and will transfer replete with its all-American cast of JC Cutler, Kate Eifrig, Jim Lichtscheidl and Valeri Mudek.

Tony Kushner is one of America’s most prolific playwrights and the winner of awards including the Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, an Emmy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, two Evening Standard Awards and a Golden Globe. His plays include Angels in America, A Bright Room Called Day, Homebody/Kabul, Hydriotaphia and Slavs!. He also wrote the book and lyrics for Caroline, or Change (which transferred to the National Theatre in 2006), and the screenplays for Angels in America and Munich. 

Director Tony Taccone commissioned Kushner’s Angels in America, co-directed its world premiere, and has collaborated with Kushner on seven projects including Brundibar.

The five plays featured in Tiny Kushner are:

  • Flip Flop Fly!: A bizarre lunar encounter between two dead women. With one nattering on about her life in entertainment and the other about her life in exile, the two compare the courses of their lives.

  • Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or “Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein” or Ambivalence: Sitting in an office are Esther, an analyst, and her former patient, Hendryk, along with their lovers, Dymphna and Billygoat, respectively, as Hendryk, pleads with Esther to take him back as a patient.

    East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: a little teleplay in tiny monologues: An outrageous 1990s scheme actually used to avoid paying taxes. As a housing detective discovers its success, news of the fraud spreads rapidly, prompting the government to investigate.

  • Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker in Paradise: Metatron, a Recording Angel with a million eyes, is holding a supervisory session with Dr. Hutschneker  in an upscale office in heaven. The two discuss how Hutschneker’s pains and his denial of mortality could quite possibly be related to his sessions with his own patient, Richard Milhous Nixon.
  • Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy: Now-former First Lady Laura Bush reads from The Brothers Karamazov to the pyjama-clad ghosts of dead Iraqi children, all of whom are watched over by an angel.