Event: Illinois Wesleyan University’s McPherson Theatre presents: Fen, a play by Caryl Churchill
Date: Feb. 25-March 2, 2003 (Tuesday-Sunday)
Time: 8:00 p.m., Tuesday-Saturday and 2:00 p.m., Sunday
Location: McPherson Theatre, Illinois Wesleyan University, 2 Ames Plaza East, Bloomington
Admission: Individual tickets for Tuesday-Thursday performances are $6 for adults and $5 for seniors, and $8 for adults and $7 for seniors on Friday and Saturday. Tickets are $1 for students with an IWU or ISU ID. They may be reserved a week in advance by calling the McPherson Theatre box office at 309/556-3232, and may also be purchased at the door.
Background: Village Voice hails Fen, “A wonderful and strange play; passionate, tense and eloquent.”
Written in 1983 and set in the ’80s, Fen is an unsentimental exploration of life on the North Sea coast of England. Four generations of women deal with life and working the land in England’s marshlands. The play, said by critics to be a “gritty vision of rural life and labor,” represents any tough life at any time, a life insulated from the rest of the world and constricting in its options.
Verging on documentary, Fen is the result of Caryl Churchill’s two-week stay in a remote East Anglian fen village. There, she collected oral histories and observed “a never-ending cycle of drudgery and oppression,” according to one director.
With a small cast consisting of seven women and one man, “this is a minimalist production, meaning there will be a larger focus on the actors and acting versus the set,” said Sandra Lindberg, assistant professor of theatre arts at Illinois Wesleyan and director of Fen. Working with a small budget, Lindberg decided to use all recycled materials in the production. She also plans to invite the Migrant Farm Labor Association and Independent Farmers Association to see the show since it is about migrant farmers and how corporate farming took over England. “We think the audience will instantly pick up on the ecological message,” said Lindberg.
Churchill, born in London on Sept. 3, 1938, grew up in England and Canada. Schooled at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Churchill wrote her first play, Downstairs, while she was still at the university. It was first staged in 1958 and won an award at the National Union of Students Drama Festival. She has since written several successful plays including Vinegar Tom (1976), Cloud Nine (1979), A Mouthful of Birds (1986), and The Striker (1994) and “is one of the most influential female playwrights of the past twenty years,” according to many thespians.
Churchill received the Obie Award in 1982 and 1983 and in 1988 received both the Obie Award and a Society of West End Theatre Award.
Contact: For more information, contact Danielle Drogos, publicity coordinator for the IWU School of Theatre Arts, at 309/556-3442.
