SM Playeaders presents “The Velocity of Autumn”
Event Category: All Events, Artistic Events, Community Events, Literary Events, Entertainment, and Theatrical Events
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The Velocity of Autumn
This work, wickedly funny and wonderfully touching, by the playwright, Eric Coble, swirls around Alexandra, a colorful 80-year- old artist in a showdown with her family over where she’ll spend her twilight years. To make her position perfectly clear, Alexandra has barricaded herself in her Brooklyn brownstone with enough homemade explosives (mostly made of wine bottles) to take out the entire neighborhood. Into this tense situation comes her long-lost son, Chris, crawling through her apartment window to become the family’s unlikely mediator.
On Broadway they advertised it this way: “She’s going out with a bang: one mother, one son, 100 Molotov cocktails.”
On a serious level The Velocity of Autumn is fundamentally a study of a woman of intelligence and will wrestling with the inevitable diminishments that come with age. Alexandra’s real enemies are not the officious family pressuring her to leave her home…or the police. No, the real foes are harder to vanquish, the small daily humiliations that age brings, the legs that no longer work, the mind and memory that cloud up, “Proper nouns are the first thing to leave the body,” Alexandra complains. However, she hasn’t yet lost her sense of humor, now she can reread her favorite mysteries without remembering whodunnit!
The Velocity of Autumn is both a wickedly funny and wonderfully touching revelation of the ferocity and fragility of life. Although the play deals with sad issues concerning the indignities of aging as Alexandra refuses to go gentle into that good night, she entertains us with profound insights into the beauty and transitory nature of human existence.
Marthe Fraser directs Lois Read as the irascible Alexandra and BJ Abrahamson as the truant son, Chris.
The Velocity of Autumn plays at The Santa Ana Theater, Relox 50A
Wednesday, January 18
Thursday, January 19
100 pesos donation, tickets sold only at the door.
Doors open 5:30 pm, Curtain 6 pm
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