Beverly Friend

Certainly, Duras lived a colorful life, born in 1914 in Gia-Dinh, French Indochina (now Vietnam), where her widowed mother struggled to bring up Marguerite and her two brothers. She chronicled these early years in several books which detail the plot of the play, candidly exposing her dysfunctional family. Her mother preferred her oldest to the younger children (resulting in a vicious elder brother who tyrannized the whole family). She engaged in an incestuous relationship her younger brother, and later had a memorable love affair with the spoiled young son of a wealthy Chinese merchant.

Can a fabulously rich woman find happiness with a relative pauper? Can a woman with a father fixation come to terms with an oedipal mate? What happens when parents influence their children (and their choice of partners) from beyond the grave? Come and find out.

No one who has seen Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George will ever view the Art Institute’s famous Seurat painting in quite the same way. In fact, the painting itself becomes a character in the play — reflecting time and mood as lighting plays on it, shifting shadows. Pointillist painting and pointed play come to life simultaneously as each tree and figure in that famous park emerges on the huge theater backdrop.