Synetic Theater, the DC Area’s unique movement-theater specialists, will be presenting four adaptations of works better known for their dazzling language in its 2013-2014 season, the company has announced.
Synetic will be reprising its acclaimed production of Hamlet…the Rest is Silence, the wordless 2002 production which catapulted Synetic into the attention of the theatergoing public and won it a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Resident Play. “[I]ts emotional jabs strike as no conventional theatrical production can,” Sarah Kaufman said in the Washington Post of Synetic’s 2007 version of the show. Synetic Artistic Director Paata Tsikurishvili will direct this production, which will begin on March 13, 2014 and end on April 6 of the same year.
The company will also be producing another wordless Shakespeare classic – its tenth – when it stages Twelfth Night between January 9 and February 16, 2014. In this story, a young woman named Viola lands in a strange country when her ship sinks and, believing her twin brother to be dead, disguises herself as a boy in order to work as a page for a local Duke. A bizarre love triangle ensues when she falls in love with the Duke, who is in love with a neighboring Lady, who in turn falls in love with the disguised Viola. Tsikurishvili will direct.
The Synetic season will start out with an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde’s story is about a young, high-living aristocrat who, having dedicated his life to the pursuit of beauty, offers his soul if he can remain young throughout his life while his portrait ages. Offer accepted! Dorian Gray will run from September 26 to November 3 of this year; Tsikurishvili will direct.
Derek Goldman will direct the Synetic season finale, which is his own adaptation of Jerome K. Jerome’s novel/travelogue, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). First published in 1889, it begins as a serious account of a boating trip undertaken by three young men imagining themselves to suffer from overwork, but soon descends into comic lunacy. The book was poorly received by critics but sold so well that the publisher once wrote, “I often think that the public must eat [copies].” Goldman, a professor of theater studies at Georgetown University, has directed his own adaptations before – most notably, of Kafka’s Metamorphosis for Synetic in 2010.
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) will run from May 8 to June 8, 2014.
The multiple Helen Hayes Award-winning choreographer Irini Tsikurishvili will choreograph all four productions.
Season subscriptions cost between $130 and $165 and can be obtained here.
