TampaRep returns to the Studio Theatre at HCC Ybor City in less than a month, and we’re really excited about working on the wonderful play. Betrayal, the 20th play by Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter, won 1979 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play (England’s equivalent of the Tony Award — the Oscars of theatre).
Famously known as the “backwards play,” Pinter arranged the play’s scenes, with a few exceptions, in reverse chronological order. The play dissects the aftermath of a triangular relationship among Robert (the husband), Emma (his wife), and Jerry (the best friend — and longtime lover of Emma). The first scene shows a meeting two years after the affair’s end, then the story works its way back to the beginning moments of the affair — allowing us to see and ponder the various ways in which the characters have changed and betrayed each other (and themselves?) for years. A scintillating play filled with biting humor, rage, and love, many consider is “the greatest, and the most moving, of all Pinter’s plays.” When it opened, Newsweek declared that “Betrayal is an exquisite play, brilliantly simple in form and courageous in its search for a poetry that turns banality into a melancholy beauty.”
Betrayal has been produced three times on Broadway, most recently in an acclaimed 2013 revival starring reigning James Bond Daniel Craig and his wife, Rachel Weisz.
Watch the trailer for TampaRep’s production
[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuZgo2Dvb3Y[/embedyt]
Our production features some of Tampa’s stars: Ned Averill-Snell as Robert, Emilia Sargent as Emma, and Greg Thompson as Jerry. All three will be familiar to TampaRep regulars — Ned and Emilia most recently appeared together as another married couple in I Do! I Do! Separately, you may have seen Ned as Claudius in Hamlet and Emilia as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and as Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. Greg played the charming Reverend Tooker in last season’s A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and, like Ned and Emilia, has quickly become one of Tampa’s busiest actors.
(Photo courtesy of Désirée Fantal)
Betrayal opens on May 7th and runs (Thursdays through Sundays) until May 24th. Purchase tickets on our website, or contact reservations@tamparep.org.
Season Five is Coming!
We’re getting closer to announcing the four plays in Season Five: American Visions. It’s a season of twos. Two productions will take place in Studio 120 on the USF Tampa campus (site of our record-breaking production of Imagining Madoff) and two will take place in the Smith Black Box at Tampa Preparatory School (where Ned appeared in the solo show The Apocrypha of Theodore Roosevelt — and which will perform in the re-configured Murray Theatre at Ruth Eckerd Hall on May 29 & 30). Two plays by women, two by men; two American classics, two more contemporary works (that will be classics); two big shows, two fairly intimate — but all four will be exciting theatrical pieces, plays that reflect the heart of TampaRep: they’re innovative, provocative, and classic.
We’re also lining up TRT2’s season — and it’s shaping up to be another year of new and established artists exploring exciting plays in the intimate confines of the newly renovated Silver Meteor Gallery (and we’ll have more news soon about the next edition of Tampa Wrights — opening in June).
Get a head start on the 2015-16 season by buying a FlexPass — still $99 for 8 punches to TampaRep and TRT2 shows. Buy yours before May 7th, and it includes a bonus ticket to any of the opening weekend performances of Betrayal!
We’re ending our fourth season in style, and planning our biggest and best season yet. We couldn’t have made it this far without you, and we hope you’ll continue to be part of our growing success. So, come out to Betrayal — and bring a friend, someone who hasn’t been to the theatre. If you have the time, think about becoming a TampaRep volunteer — just contact Jeanne Adams, our Coordinator of Volunteers and let her know how you’d like to help — as an usher or box office staff, on sets or costumes, or on the business side. If you’re planning on shopping online, think about Amazon Smile — for every purchase you make, a small amount comes to us. And, of course, if you can, please become a donor to TampaRep. Just go to our Donation page and choose a category (and the perks that go with it).
Whichever you do, we’re grateful to you — and you’re helping us in our quest — to make theatre that’s innovative, provocative, and classic.
That’s TampaRep.
C. David Frankel
Artistic Director