Benefit preview performances of Why We Laugh: A Terezín Cabaret
June 2, 2011 (St. Paul) and June 5, 2011 (Minneapolis), 2011
by Kira Obolensky, director Hayley Finn, composer Craig Harris, translator and dramaturg Lisa Peschel featuring Julie Kurtz, Elise Langer, Ryan Lindberg and Skyler Nowinski based on an original cabaret by Felix Porges, Vítězslav Horpatzky, Pavel Weisskopf and Pavel Stránský
Thursday, June 2, 2011 at 7:30 pm
The C.S.P.S. Sokol Hall
383 Michigan Street
St. Paul, Minnesota 55102
Sunday, June 5, 2011 at 7:00 pm
The Loring Theater
1407 Nicollet Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55403
Suggested donation $25; additional contributions welcome! For reservations please call 917-397-6345.
Step in Time Theater is raising funds to stage the world premiere of Why We Laugh: A Terezín Cabaret in the Czech Republic! Please join us for our benefit preview performances.
Why We Laugh is a new adaptation of Laugh With Us!, a cabaret written and performed in 1944 in the World War II Jewish Ghetto at Terezín (in German, Theresienstadt), just 40 miles northwest of Prague. The cabaret, complete with its original sheet music, came to light in the spring of 2005 in two separate family archives. The original cabaret is set in a postwar Prague identical to the beloved city the Czech Jews remembered from the late 1930s. In playwright Kira Obolensky’s new adaptation, characters based on the original Terezín performers encounter “the scholar,” a theater historian from our present. As the performers look forward to the postwar future and the scholar looks back toward their past, they confront each other with difficult questions: why did the Terezín prisoners laugh, and what does that laughter mean to us today?
The world premiere of Why We Laugh will take place in Terezín on June 15, 2011 and the performance will be featured in the Nine Gates Festival of Czech-German-Jewish Culture in Prague on June 18, 2011. For more information please see:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/pesc0029/lisapeschel/why-we-laugh.html
If you would like to support us but can’t attend the benefit performances, please see:
http://givemn.razoo.com/story/Why-We-Laugh
For the latest information on the benefit performances please see:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/pesc0029/lisapeschel/benefit-performances-of-why-we-laugh.html
Why We Laugh is a sponsored project of Springboard for the Arts.