If you go
‘Three Fantasies’
Where: Theatre 2, the Performing Arts Center, Montgomery College, Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus, 7995 Georgia Ave., Silver Spring
When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday; additional matinee 2 p.m. Nov. 21; through Nov. 22
Info: 240-567-5775; montgomerycollege.edu
Throughout November, Montgomery College’s Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus is christening the smaller of its new performing arts spaces with a production of “Three Fantasies,” by Don Nigro. “Theatre 2 is a modified thrust, which seats 116,” Perry Schwartz, the production’s director and co-producer, said. “It’s intimate, but state of the art.”
The shows Schwartz has picked to open Theatre 2 are related by theme, tone and a the sense of whimsy associated with their author. “I chose these plays because I think Nigro’s language is unique and interesting,” Schwartz said.
“Nigro doesn’t write like a realist, he uses a more lyrical, poetic language, but it’s still contemporary. And his time-frame is a long way from realism. These plays are set in a would-be, fantasy Middle Ages, not the historic Middle Ages.”
The plays represented in “Three Fantasies” are: “The Woodman and the Goblins,” “Fair Rosamund and Her Murderer” and “Dr. Faustus.” In the first, a lonely woodcutter finds three eggs in the middle of a dark forest. He brings them home and they hatch into three beautiful young girls who first enchant, then torment and finally destroy the Woodman.
In “Fair Rosamund,” King Henry II establishes his lover, Rosamund, in the center of a labyrinth, where only he can reach her. The jealous queen sends a murderer to kill Rosamund. “Nigro says at the beginning of the play that he has taken these characters from history,” Schwartz said.
“But after he goes through the explanation of the play’s historical veracity, he says, ‘But this play has nothing to do with any of that.’ That’s typical of Nigro’s sense of humor. Anyway, when the murderer arrives, he and Rosamund fall in love with one another.” Yet their love is doomed as they cannot exit the labyrinth.
In “Dr. Faustus,” Faustus is bored with life, so he conjures up the devil, mostly as a joke. “The devil turns out to be different from what we would expect, in that it’s female,” explained Schwartz. “It’s a special devil for Faustus, which means a special hell for him.
“All three of these plays are about people ending up alone and isolated. The plays are contemporary in that sense that they ask: how does one deal with loneliness and possibly avoid it? In these plays, it’s pretty much unavoidable.”
