Actors Shakespeare Company Producing World Premiere of ‘Logomaniacs’ at NJCU
By Jon Whiten • Dec 9th, 2010 • Category: Arts, Blog
Jersey City’s Actors Shakespeare Company will celebrate a new milestone tonight, with its first-ever mainstage production of a world premiere play. The play, Logomaniacs, was written Newbery Award winner Paul Fleischman and will run at the West Side Theater on the NJCU campus for just over two weeks.
Billed as an “intellectual freak show,” Logomaniacs examines people whose passion for words carries them to extremes, from Georges Perec and his novel without the letter “e” to the Russian futurists and their invented language, “Zaum.”
Describing the play as “a tour of wonders built with words,” Fleischman says Logomaniacs exhibits “26 real-life word-obsessives — one per alphabet letter — in a series of swift scenes.” A troupe of four actors — Timur Kocak, Jessica Myhr, Colin Ryan and Paul Sugarman — narrates and acts the 90-minute performance in a quick-change manner.
The play begins with a special pay-what-you-will preview tonight (7:30 pm), and runs Thursdays through Sundays until December 19 (7:30 pm; 3 pm on Saturdays Sundays). Sunday, December 12 marks the official opening, with a cast and author Q&A and then a reception after the play, featuring a meet-and-greet with the cast and some of the real-life characters who inspired them.
Tickets are $30 ($15 for students and seniors, and pay-your-age for children under 15), with $10 preview tickets for the December 10 and 11 performances. (All tickets for the December 12 event are $30.) To purchase tickets, click here or call 201-200-2390. The 125-seat West Side Theater is located at 285 West Side Avenue.
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Jon Whiten is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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