The Kimmel Center produces a singular evening of two new works: Turquoise, a human symphony of simultaneity, and solo work Just Give Me One Half Hour With My Mother, both by Obie Award winning playwright Deb Margolin. These comedies ripple through memory, moving because and in spite of time, begging you to say and do everything you absolutely must before there is none left.
Play I – Just Give Me One Half Hour With My Mother
Just Give Me One Half Hour With My Mother is Margolin’s newest solo work. Five years after her mother has died, Margolin brings her back for just thirty minutes to beg her to provide the punchline to this riot of a joke she just can’t quite finish—and the rest comes pouring out. She’ll cover all the bases—love, death, cut flowers, and existential snails. This poignant and as always comedic discussion investigates the way moments can leave an imprint on the human spirit, no matter how small, relative to eternity. Relative to. What a beautiful phrase!
Performed by Deb Margolin
Co-Directed by Jay Wahl and Merri Milwe
Play II - Turquoise
Turquoise is a disruption of memory play, investigating how the entire world can exist in a single moment—a single word. Revealing uproariously funny and devastating truths through the whole spectrum of human experience: an old couple married for 67 years lying in bed together; a concert pianist with a traumatic brain injury who can only remember the world for seven seconds at a time and his day nurse; and two teenage boys struggling through their feelings for each other and themselves. In Margolin’s own words “TURQUOISE aims to explore aspects of this universe as they engrave themselves on the human spirit, in love, in death, in simple acts of memory and kindness.”
Directed by Jay Wahl
Deb Margolin Bio
Deb Margolin, a resident playwright at New Dramatists since 2008, is a playwright, actor and founding member of Split Britches Theatre Company. She is the author of nine full-length solo performance pieces, which she has toured throughout the United States, and is the recipient of a 1999-2000 OBIE Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance. Her multi-character play, Three Seconds in the Key, commissioned by The Public Theater and premiered by New Georges in New York, won the 2005 Kesselring Prize for Playwriting. Margo Jefferson of the New York Times called the work “a fiercely good play.” Why Cleaning Fails, a play that bridges simple acts of domestic cleaning with the massive act of cleaning called for by the events of 9/11, was presented by HERE Arts Center in New York, and occassioned a New York Times House and Home Section look at the mess in Margolin’s house. Her play, Critical Mass, an investigation of the impulse to tell people what’s wrong with them, was translated into Hebrew and presented in Israel. Her most recent play, Imagining Madoff, opened in the summer of 2010 at Stageworks/Hudson in New York, and will be presented at Theatre J in Washington, DC in the fall of this year, as well as several other regional theaters around the U.S. A book of Deb’s performance pieces and plays, entitled Of All The Nerve: Deb Margolin SOLO, was published in 1999 by Cassell/Continuum Press. Deb was awarded the 2005 Richard H. Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence at Yale University, and a 2008 Helen Merrill Distinguished Playwright award. Deb’s work has been commissioned by The Jewish Museum of New York, Actors Theatre of Louisville, The Public, P.S. 122 and many other venues. She is honored to be a member of New Dramatists, and she lives in New Jersey, which she adamantly denies.
Turquoise Cast
GUY WITH NOTHING - Amanda Schoonover*
LORNE - Brian Rock
LEANNE - Angie Fennell
ESTHER - Mary Martello*
MORRIS - Paul Mansfield
RAN DJ - Gleason
LENNY - Evan Sleppy
*Actors appear through the courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.
Set and Lighting Design by Thom Weaver
Costume Design by Cloe Fox Wind
Sound Design by Liz Atkinson
Stage Manager: Dana Katz