Closing performance Aesop’s delightful fables full of wit and wisdom let the animals do the talking; dispensing lessons on perseverance, kindness, and friendship along the way. Aesop’s Guide to Friendship explores age-old stereotypes and mannerisms in his fables such as “tortoise are slow,” “hares are quick,” “foxes are clever” to help young and old alike appreciate our similarities and differences.
Godfrey, recently widowed, is spellbound by charismatic preacher, Father Divine, while his teen daughters, Ernestine and Ermina, find refuge from the racial prejudices of 1950s Brooklyn in Hollywood movies. With the arrival of their fiercely independent Aunt Lily, things suddenly change: Godfrey marries a white woman displaced from war-torn Germany, Ermina discovers boys, and Ernestine is torn between communism and bebop. From the pen of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, the play examines a family’s process of grief and healing in a decade of political, racial, and social upheaval in the United States.
With a unique brew of laughter and darkness, Shakespeare’s tale of impassable moral dilemmas, religious hypocrisy, and he said/she said examines the complex relationships between those in power and those they govern. The quality of mercy is strained to the point of breaking in this dark comedy about the corruption of justice and authority…and the true nature of love and mercy.