Big Love
Big Love by Charles Mee
Presented by The Aluminous Collective
November 6 – 21, 2009
Fridays – Saturdays at 8:00pm
Tickets: $12.00 – $15.00 – Click here to purchase tickets.
Reservations: 720.221.3821 or lida@lida.org
Fifty brides flee to Italy to escape a forced marriage to fifty grooms. The grooms give chase to their brides-to-be, and a wild story of love, aggression, compassion and violence unfolds. Helicopters, tomatoes, flailing brides, befuddled grooms, swinging chandeliers…
All this, plus singing and dancing too.
In Big Love Charles Mee has taken one of the very oldest surviving plays in the western world, reduced it to ruins, and ‘written a new play, set in the world today’. In this modern version, rife with pop songs and power struggles, fifty young women are contracted to marry their cousins and no one in their world has the power or inclination to save them. So, forty nine brides murder forty nine grooms on their wedding night, and one bride falls in love; ‘about the same odds as today’.
Dave Lohrey in his Curtain Up review lauds Mee for creating ‘an explosively theatrical hybrid, the vaudevillian tragicomedy. It is, to say the least, a most improbable combination, but it works, gloriously.’ Since the Spring of 2009, a large ensemble of over twenty artists in the Boulder / Denver area have pillaged Mee’s work, just as he has pillaged material from ancient Greece, and re-made a new piece true to our own times.
The Aluminous Collective is a newly formed group of collaborators, founded by graduates of Naropa University’s MFA program in Contemporary Performance. Big Love is co-sponsored by The Boulder International Fringe Festival.