Theatre UNB is set to close its 2021-22 season with Middletown, a play by acclaimed American playwright Will Eno that won the 2010 Horton Foote Award for Most Promising New Play.
Loosely inspired by Thornton Wilder’s classic American drama Our Town, Middletown is a contemporary reworking of Wilder’s play that revisits and re-examines Our Town’s timeless themes of the cycles of life, once again through the microcosm of a small middle-American town and the citizens who live there. Often funny and strange (Eno has been called a “Samuel Beckett for the John Stewart generation” by the New York Times), Middletown is also profoundly moving and poignant in its note-perfect appreciation of the minutiae of everyday life, and its perceptive charting of the unknown journey through the middle ground between birth and death that we all travel every day.
Featuring the seventeen students in UNB’s Drama 2175 class, Middletown is directed by Len Falkenstein, with technical direction and design by Trent Logan and Judy Joe Scheffler, and boasts an original score composed and performed by Devin Rockwell.
Middletown will be performed at 7:30 nightly from Wednesday, April 6 through Saturday, April 9 at Memorial Hall, UNB. Tickets ($14 regular, $10 seniors/underemployed, and $8 for students) are available at the door. Patrons should be aware that the play deals with mental health struggles, and that UNB remains under a mask mandate. For more information, phone 506 447-3078, email lfalken@unb.ca, or visit Facebook.com/TheatreUNB.
