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Telluride’s SquidShow opens “Big Love” at Ah Haa 2/21

20 Feb Telluride’s SquidShow opens “Big Love” at Ah Haa 2/21

Posted at 04:30h in Performing Arts by
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[click “Play to listen to director Krissy Smith talk about “Big Love”]

Image001 Telluride’s SquidShow Theatre Company turns up the heat with its winter production of Charles L. Mee’s “Big Love.” (No, not that one. It’s not HBO.) Performances are February 21, 22, 28, and March 1 at The Ah Haa School for the Arts (300 South Townsend Avenue). Show time is 8 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Mee is a playwright after Telluride’s heart, the ultimate recycler. The writer/historian is known for radical reconstructions of found texts which he uses to create what amount to staged collages: “Big Love,” based on “The Suppliant Women” by Aeschylus is a vaudevillian tragic-comedy that infuses the ancient text with pop songs, helicopters, dancing, singing, acrobatics and Mee’s words.

“I went to You Tube and the Internet for inspiration,” explained director Krissy Smith, “because that’s where collage art is happening now. Kids mashing up old movies with rock music, it’s where media you’ve seen before gets stitched together to create something new. We are using this stuff in our production because it’s very appropriate to how Mee’s plays feel.”

In the theatrical free-for-all, “Big Love,” 50 brides seek refuge in an Italian villa they mistake for a hotel. When their 50 grooms catch up, all hell breaks loose – literally. In a key stroke, Mee updates the age-old battle of the sexes found in Aeschylus to address contemporary American themes such as domestic abuse, date rape and gender inequality. In the end “Big Love” is at once a meditation on the concepts of justice and revenge and an unbuttoned celebration of the enduring, albeit irrational power of love.

The Squid’s adaptation of “Big Love” brings the town of Telluride into the story through the medium of film: a mini documentary about love and marriage threads through the production.

“Big Love” features the acting talents of Jeb Berrier, Sam Burgess, Sasha Cucciniello, Ethan Hale, Linda Levin, Jesse Martin, Dahlia Mertens, Brittany Miller, Tom Shane, Colin Sullivan, Amy Thomas. Directed by Krissy Smith with costumes by Sue Hobby and video by Alexei Kaleina.

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