The final play in Theatre BC’s Mainstage Festival 2019 hits the stage at ADSS Theatre in Port Alberni tonight (Friday, July 12).
Opening Nite Theatre Society from the Fraser Valley Zone earned the wild card slot in the provincial theatre fest with Age of Arousal, written by Linda Griffiths.
Age of Arousal portrays a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with unbridled desire. It’s 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man struggle to find their way.
Miss Mary Barfoot runs a school for secretaries with her young lover, Miss Rhoda Nunn. But when the Misses Madden—spinsters Virginia and Alice and beautiful young Monica—arrive, along with the attractive Dr. Everard Barfoot, things can never be the same. Age of Arousal is a lavish, sexy, frenetic ensemble piece about the forbidden and gloriously liberated self - genre-busting, rule-bending, and ambitiously original.
Age of Arousal will be presented in two acts with one, 20-minute intermission. Doors to the ADSS Theatre (4000 Roger St., Port Alberni) open at 7 p.m., curtain rises at 7:30 p.m. The audience is reminded to stay following the performance each night for a brief public critique by Mainstage adjudicator, Dean Paul Gibson.
Tickets are available at the door for $25 each.