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For Immediate Release: February 25, 2008
Brown Theatre
PR Contacts:
Brian Gaston, Box Office Manager - 401-863-2730
Selena Brown, Public Relations Assistant - theatrepr@brown.edu
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John Emigh Directs Lifelong Vision of Peer Gynt at Brown Theatre

Theatre director, performer, and author on the subject of the masked-theatre and rituals of New Guinea, Bali, and India, as well as Western theatre, John Emigh has wanted to direct Peer Gyntsince his youth. Using masks and puppetry for the most abstract of moments, Emigh’s broad vision engages the talents of a flexible cast to tell this epic story of a man discovering his own humanity, like peeling the many layers of an onion. To give life to Emigh’s vision, set designer Michael McGarty redesigned Stuart Theatre, placing the first six rows on the stage and planting a shipwreck in the middle of the audience. Unbounded by history, the text is enriched with music from Grieg’s Mountain King to Shakira; belly dancing, showgirls, and pole dancers; monkeys and trolls; and features the talents of master puppet-makers Ermenio Pinque (Big Nazo) and Brian Gaston and protégé Sophia Tintori. In Peer Gynt, John Emigh recognizes himself enough to be embarrassed, and hopes the same for the audience. He says, “Peer Gynt was written by the Ibsen we often forget.”

Why Peer Gynt?It’s not your grandfather’s Ibsen! Before he wrote his celebrated realist plays, Ibsen penned this sprawling, epic masterwork - wondering himself if it could ever be staged. Escaping the stifling village life around him, a young man sets out to find himself, and encounters lust, love and riches, royal trolls, the fabled Sphinx and the devil himself, while discovering his own limitations, and a chance for redemption. Like nothing written before or since, Peer Gynt celebrates the energy and vitality of Romanticism while skewering its excesses. It continues to challenge and enliven our theatre and our lives. It’s an epic story about a man that rumbles from one misadventure to another trying to learn how to exist with others or to define that ability, a sort of Nietzschean self-fulfillment. Through the story the characters learn the human face or an idea of being alive, occasionally moving toward the abstract with a certain imaginative richness of a script written for a theatre that didn’t yet exist.

John Emigh is the author of several articles and books including Masked Performance: the Place of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre. Emigh has directed over 60 plays at universities and in the professional theatre. He is a Professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance and former Department Chair. Emigh’s solo performances of Balinese mask techniques have played throughout the United States, Bali, and India. Current projects include investigating the links between the traditional concerns of theatre and recent findings in the field of neuroscience, preparing a museum exhibit and international conference on the mask and concepts of person for the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, as well as research on the carnival and Christmas traditions of masked performance in Alpine Europe and Mexico. After 40-plus years at Brown University, he retires in 2009.

Brown Theatre and Sock & Buskin present:

Peer Gynt
Written by Henrik Ibsen
Adapted and directed by John Emigh

March 6-9 & 13-16, 2008
Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 PM and Sundays at 2 PM
Stuart Theatre in the Catherine Bryan Dill Center for the Performing Arts
77 Waterman Street, Providence, RI 02912

Box Office: (401) 863-2730 
Tickets now available online!
www.brown.edu/tickets