Boomerang Theatre Company's 2005 Fall Season

The Boomerang Theatre Company announce their 2005 Fall season-consisting of three plays in rotating repertory: John Dryden's All For Love, Tom Stoppard's Artist Descending a Staircase and the World Premiere of the allegorical drama Giant-n-Variation.

All three works will be performed at CenterStage. The productions will begin performances on the 9 Sep 2005 and run through to the 2 Oct 2005

The theme of Boomerang's 2005 Season is "Playing with Words," with the company presenting works where language is meant be to paid attention to (especially in Giant-n-Variation), where sentences can have double meanings; and where what is uttered is not always what is heard.

If words could rend the heart asunder, they do just that in John Dryden's All For Love - a look at the desperate end of the love affair between Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

Antony was a loyal Roman and fierce warrior until he traveled to Egypt and fell under the spell of the beautiful Cleopatra. The two began a passionate 10-year romance with Antony forsaking his wife, family, and eventually the respect of Rome itself because of his obsessive love for the Egyptian princess. Yet over the years Antony has been slowly suffocated by Cleopatra's needs, leaving him a shell of the man he once was. Now desperate to leave Cleopatra, he cannot bring himself to do so. Likewise, Cleopatra knows what is happening to Antony, but because she needs him so much, cannot bring herself to let him go, thwarting his half-hearted moves of independence at every turn.

But the matter may soon be moot as Octavius Caesar, the brother of Antony's spurned wife, has amassed his forces to march on Egypt and destroy the lovers. As their world comes apart around them, Antony and Cleopatra try to cling to memories of their great love, when anything was possible and happiness was theirs for the taking.

Directed by Cailin Heffernan, the cast of All For Love features Sheryl McCallum (Broadway's The Lion King) as Cleopatra. The rest of the cast includes Taylor Nicole Adams, Steven Bari, Ursula Cataan, Luis Miguel Echegaray, Kirk Gostkowski, Ingrid Griffiths, Andrew Harris, Bram Heidinger, Mark Light-Orr, Gregory Mikell, Peter Picard, Stephanie Rosenberg and Melissa Haley Smith.

All For Love will begin performances on the 9 Sep 2005 and run through to the 30 Sep 2005.

From the tragic effects the words of love can bring to showing how love can be affected by words not spoken, Boomerang next presents Tom Stoppard's wry drama Artist Descending a Staircase.

This is the story of three octogenarian avant-garde artists, Beauchamp, Martello and Donner, who have lived and worked together for close to 60 years and have probably been friends longer than that. But as the play opens Donner is found dead, with Martello and Beauchamp each certain the other did it. As the two (relatively calmly) accuse one another, the play flashes back through the decades and we see how a very special woman once came into their lives, affecting all three men in different ways, and how her actions set in motion a chain of event which have reverberated through the years.

A tale about roads not taken and words not spoken, this is the first professional production of Artist Descending a Staircase since it debuted on Broadway in 1989. The show is directed by John Hurley and features Ronald Cohen, Tom Knutson, Mary Murphy, Michael Poignand, Ed Schultz, Joe Whelski and Aaron Zook.

Artist Descending a Staircase will begin performances on the 10 Sep 2005 and run through to the 2 Oct 2005.

For a look at language of a different kind, one must ask the question if it's possible that two species such as humans and cows can communicate on a verbal level. If so, what could they teach us and what could we learn about ourselves? Such is the premise set up in the World Premiere production of Francis Kuzler's intriguing allegory Giant-n-Variation.

Linguist Evelyn believes some form of commutation with cows is possible and is determined to prove her theory. With a new assistant Tom, a drifter she picked up along the way, she visits farms across the country checking out bovine behavior for her research. Evelyn's journey eventually takes her to a failing Texas ranch run by May, an animal behaviorist who is fiercely determined to make a go of the family property. When these three people come together, something wonderful just might happen, but first they have to start looking beyond themselves to see what's really going around them. And are those twin Hereford bulls (Giant and Variation) actually saying something?

Directed by Eric Amburg, the cast of Giant-n-Variation features Zack Calhoon, Dante Giammarco, Jennifer Larkin, Barbara Drum Sullivan, Carsey Walker Jr. and Christopher Yeatts.

Giant-n-Variation will be performed from the 15 Sep 2005 - 1 Oct 2005.