Stages

Jerome McDonough's ability to condense mankind into one tiny package is revealed again in this play. This work depicts the entire history of the theatre in 35 minutes. It begins with Greek ritual and ends with the current post-modern ritual. A play for players, Stagesreveals the emotions of the playwright, director, stage manager and performers. Humor, frustration, dreams and despair—the stuff of life itself—is the stuff of this riveting play.Stages is a montage of theatre as life (or, perhaps, life as theatre) as only Jerome McDonough can do it. This riveting play, a multi-faceted examination of theatre and, by extension, of life, sweeps us through the frustrations of play creation and production. We see the players search for themselves behind their own masks and the inevitability of the closing performance—or is it just part of an insidious cycle? As the playwright claws for his own truth, the performers find scene-by-scene challenges spanning the spectrum of theatre history, from ancient ritual and the Greeks through Shakespeare, the Comedy of Manners, the melodrama, the early realists, the naturalists and the absurdists right up to the brutal, neo-ritual confrontation of the current Avant-Garde.