Word: ayckbourn
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...central device in Alan Ayckbourn's Communicating Doors is a portal between hotel suites that carries women who step through it either 20 years forward or 20 years back in time. This idea may seem offbeat even for a farce, but it is not surprising from a man whose nearly 50 other plays involve such tricks as a robot spouse used in a child-custody battle; audience choices that provide a script with 16 endings; and a three-story house seen on one level (with actors tiptoeing up and down -- that is, back and forth -- along imaginary stairs). "Games...
Perhaps best known for Absurd Person Singular, Ayckbourn is one of the world's most widely produced playwrights (translated into 32 languages) and surely among the most inventive. Over the years he has found plausible plot uses for everything from a Dungeons & Dragons-style game to London's Waterloo Bridge and has evoked laughs from such unlikely topics as a violent bank robbery and a young beauty's attempts to kill herself with the everyday tools and appliances of her suburban kitchen. Ayckbourn's originality, wit, poignancy and unfailing empathy for middle-class values have made him the dominant commercial...
...Communicating Doors was the centerpiece of Chicago's International Theatre Festival, while his two-part Revengers' Comedies has been enjoying a stronger production at Washington's Arena Stage than it had in London under his own direction -- in part because Arena is in the round, like the theater Ayckbourn runs in the Yorkshire city of Scarborough. In recent years troupes in Houston, Seattle and Cleveland, Ohio, have offered major Ayckbourn productions, and in 1991 two of his shows reached Broadway in the same season...
...Ayckbourn has placed the action on three sets that fill the RSC's small stage and position the actors mere feet, if not inches, from the audience as they portray over-the-top derangement. All are good, and the two nuttiest -- Gary Whitaker, as the youth who comes to believe he is an alien, and Brenda Blethyn, as the neglected wife who regresses into toddlerhood -- rip open psychic dungeons to unleash dragons of despair...
...Ayckbourn unleashes dragons of despair in Wildest Dreams...