Interrobang Theatre Project Kicks Off 3rd Season With Paula Vogel’s HOT ‘N’ THROBBING
Interrobang Theatre Project will kick off its 3rd season with Paula Vogel’s Hot ’N’ Throbbing. Its title titillates but there’s nothing gratuitous in this powerful and confrontational one-act play that challenges an audience to chew on tough questions about domestic violence, sexual politics, role models, and society’s continued role in raising both victims and abusers. Deemed too graphic by many artistic directors, Hot ’N’ Throbbing has been largely sidelined from the stage. “If we cannot confront domestic violence on our stages,” Vogel wrote in 1995, “we will not be able to eliminate it from our living rooms.”
True to Interrobang’s mission, Hot ‘N’ Throbbing is a vehicle that will provoke dialogue and will shed light on a critical issue in our country that is as timely now as it was when Paula Vogel arrived at her first draft of the play in 1989. In effect, Hot ‘N’ Throbbing is a wake-up call to how far we’ve come and how little we’ve changed.
Hot ‘N’ Throbbing
By Paula Vogel
Directed by Jeffry Stanton
Featuring: Matthew David Gellin, Andrew Goetten, Christina Hall, Stella Martin, Griffin Sharps, and Casey Wortmann
Set Design: Mike Mroch
Costume Design: Erica Griese
Lighting Design: Claire Chrzan
Sound Design and Original Music: Christopher Kriz
Schedule
Hot ’N’ Throbbing will perform on the West Stage at the Raven Theatre Complex, 6157 N. Clark Street, Chicago, IL 60660
Opens: Saturday, September 22, 2012, 4:00 p.m.
Runs: Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays 8:00 p.m.; Sundays 3:30 p.m.
Closes: Sunday, October 21, 2012
Run Time: Approximately 90 minutes, no intermission
Previews: Thursday, September 20 & Friday, Sept 21, 8:00 p.m.
Tickets: Previews/Students/Industry $10; General Admission $25; Season Subscription $40
The Play
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel’s Hot ’N’ Throbbing unflinchingly explores the pyrotechnic intersection of sex, domestic violence, pornography, and power. Charlene is a suburban mother who writes feminist erotica to support her hormonally charged teenagers. With a script deadline looming, voices from her subconscious taunting her, and a ferocious craving for a cigarette, Charlene is having a bad day. When Clyde, Charlene’s drunk and manipulative estranged husband arrives, the day takes a turn that will change the family forever. FOR MATURE AUDIENCES.
“What happens is startling—alternatively raunchy, tough, tender, compassionate, tough again…You may be able to shake off its shock, you won’t be able to escape its pulverizing truth.” —Boston Globe
“Hot ‘N’ Throbbing is a theatrical 911 call that no serious theatergoer can afford to ignore.” —Baltimore Sun
The Playwright
Paula Vogel’s play How I Learned to Drive received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Lortel Prize, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and New York Drama Critics Awards for Best Play, as well as winning her second OBIE. Vogel’s other plays include The Long Christmas Ride Home, The Mineola Twins, The Baltimore Waltz, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, and The Oldest Profession. Paula Vogel is the Eugene O’Neill Professor (adjunct) of Playwriting and Chair of the Playwriting Department at the Yale School of Drama, as well as an artistic associate at Long Wharf Theatre. Works in progress include a commission for Yale Repertory (based on The God of Vengeance), a work in collaboration with director Rebecca Taichman, and a new play, Jitterbugging and the War Effort.
About Interrobang Theatre Project
Interrobang Theatre Project is dedicated to excellence in producing visceral, smart, substantial, and timely classic plays, rarely produced texts, and new American plays. Interrobang strives to build and encourage a new generation of theatregoers, to engage our community through challenging plays in an ongoing dialogue of ideas, to create an exciting lobby life that will allow us all the space and time to talk about the work we typically share alone in the dark, to maintain an environment in which artists can do their very best work, and to uphold live theatre and the act of collective imagining as a powerful and vital means to change our world one play at a time. Interrobang is not recommended for audiences who prefer theatre to be benign or familiar.
What’s an interrobang !?
An “interrobang” is the combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, joining the Latin for “question” (interro-) with a proofreading term for “exclamation” (bang). Punctuation expresses an attitude, an idea, an attempt to make things clearer. Through the plays we produce, Interrobang Theatre Project poses complex and intoxicating questions. Navigating through the dark together with our audience we attempt to arrive at new understandings and fresh perspectives of who we are and the world in which we live.