 Woman
by a Window & Céleste
AUTHOR: Marianne Ackerman ISBN: 0921833458
Two plays by Marianne Ackerman. Woman by a Window externalizes one woman's struggle with her desire, her will and her soul as she attempts to renounce a man and food simultaneously. She attempts to distract herself from her hungers by reading Madame Bovary, with alternately hilarious and sad results. Céleste examines the relationship between David Temple, a modern philosopher, Isaac Hirscholm, his doctor friend and Céleste, the woman who becomes the Temple's housekeeper and eventually his wife. Ackerman masterfully uses this dramatic situation to explore some of the issues raised in the work of contemporary Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor.
REVIEWS: "'We live in a world where an apple and a woman can exist alone in a room,' Soul says to Will in Marianne Ackerman's play Woman by a Window. 'No need for a sales pitch from a reptile or a second set of teeth to finish the job. Now it's all between the apple and the woman.' Bad news for boa constrictors. But good news for women—and men. The enemy has been defined in this elliptical little gem of post-modern, post-feminist theatre—and she is within. Exactly what the point is depends on the eye of the beholder. And therein lies the beauty of the piece. The questions it raises—like whether love is still possible in the final decade of the 20th century—defy answering." —The Montreal Gazette
"The experiments
of the British playwright Harold Pinter may remain in the cultural imagination
as a fond joke—'Pause...long pause'—but the dramatic problem
endures. How do you communicate lack of communication? There could hardly
be a better place to take up that challenge again than Montreal, where
language itself provides a symbol of division. And who better to do it
than playwright Marianne Ackerman, artistic director of Theatre 1774,
an English-language and sometimes bilingual company dedicated to addressing
the city's cultural mix? This trilingual script—the action is primarily
played out in English—is no simplistic tale of two solitudes brought
together by love. These three mismatched characters are bound together
by emotional intricacies they cannot express to each other and their geographic
and linguistic differences ultimately come to symbolize the solitude of
the human soul." Other
Signature titles by Marianne Ackerman: |
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