IN a few short years, Changing Times Theatre Company has grown from nought to 50 members and pitches a bold play each year. It opens Geraldine Aron’s ‘Same Old Moon’ at Belltable Arts Centre on Wednesday March 14, settling in for a four night run until Saturday March 17. Aron’s play was taken up by Garry Hynes of Druid Theatre, casting Marie Mullen and Seán McGinley, and Changing Time’s artistic director Jean Fay has wanted the play for her own Mid West troupe.
It’s wide open on the emotional plane, something reflected in its span of decades, characters and familial relationships.
“I saw it first in the Confined section in the All Ireland Amateur Drama finals three years ago and thought it ideal for us. It is a play that you can cast with eight or up to 17 people and I’m doing it with 17, some of whom have never been on the stage before. The age group is from 18 to people in their 60s and that’s interesting.”
She loves the range and reach of this as director, a challenge lots of us would reel from, especially in the light of 17 scene changes. Catriona Stack is the protagonist Brenda Barnes, a women in her 40s who looks back on a duff life that moves from Dublin to London to Australia and in failure, back to London again.
“This is a tough part for the actor as Brenda tells her story through flashbacks, looping back to the 1940s from the ‘80s to play her part from when was a small girl of nine”.
The other characters are a deceased father, cold mother, auntie, Granny, a husband who spurns her, mean kids in the schoolyard.
Ever an outcast, the adult Brenda is a writer going nowhere “whose mind often plays games with her. She has a rich imagination and seeing her life through her eyes makes for some hilarious scenes. Her father had wanted a boy and her mother sides with the father. Later in life she runs off to Australia with her Jewish husband and he ultimately rejects her too. Brenda’s imagination is always trying to make everyone be lovely – so much is going on in her head”.
Jean Fay promises a fast moving drama, one with comedy and knowledge bleeding from life’s expectations and lacerations. Changing Times brings it all together from Wednesday March 14 to Saturday 17 at Belltable, 8pm. www.belltable.ie
