Maria/Stuart is a play by Jason Grote (1001, This Storm is What We Call Progress), which premiered in 2008 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, DC. The play, inspired by Friedrich Schiller's tale of warring queens presents a comically dark escapade into the secrets of suburban America. [1]
Maria/Stuart focuses on an unhappy family as they struggle with their collective past. Ruthie, the matriarchal grandmother of the family, has a day pass from the nursing home to join the family in a celebration of her birthday. Along with Ruthie, the family includes the rival sisters, Marnie and Lizzie, nutty Aunt Sylvia and cousins Hannah and Stuart. Just as Stuart approaches his big break as a comic book artist, a German-babbling, soda-guzzling shapeshifter appears to unlock his family's skeletons. Three generations of fierce women surround Stuart and attempt to drive back the past, but these sisters and cousins seem destined to destroy each other. Eccentrically comic and eerily haunting, this Friedrich Schiller-inspired tale with a supernatural twist shows just how far a family will go to keep the past dead and buried. [1]
In 1800, Friedrich Schiller wrote Maria Stuart , a play about the 16th century Queen of Scotland Mary Stuart. Schiller's Romantic dramatization explores the rivalry between Mary and her cousin, England's Queen Elizabeth I – both of whom laid claim to the English throne following the death of Henry VIII. In Maria/Stuart, Grote explores the theme of female rivalry and depicts occasional departures from realism. Jason Grote began Maria/Stuart by outlining the structure of Schiller's play and drawing parallels in his own. Ultimately, actual text from Schiller's play emerges to reveal an unexpected dimension of Grote's. [2]
DC Theatre Scene said of the world premiere of Maria/Stuart: "absolutely astonishing. Tremendous writing, incredible acting. And laughs. Big laughs". [3]
Of the playwright, The Washington Post wrote “Grote has made a name for himself in recent years with scripts that explode the boundaries between the ordinary and the chimerical, the political and the aesthetic, the intimate and the dizzyingly cosmic.” [4]
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was a German playwright, poet, and philosopher. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller developed a productive, if complicated, friendship with the already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They frequently discussed issues concerning aesthetics, and Schiller encouraged Goethe to finish works that he had left as sketches. This relationship and these discussions led to a period now referred to as Weimar Classicism. They also worked together on Xenien, a collection of short satirical poems in which both Schiller and Goethe challenge opponents of their philosophical vision.
Sarah Marshall is a stage actress working primarily in the Washington, D.C. region. She has been nominated for the Helen Hayes Award seventeen times and won the award in 1989.
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The Helen Hayes Awards are given for acting in resident theatre productions in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The awards are generally divided between male and female performers, between lead and supporting performers, and since the early 1990s between dramatic plays and musicals.
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Mary Stuart is a verse play by Friedrich Schiller that depicts the last days of Mary, Queen of Scots. The play consists of five acts, each divided into several scenes. The play had its première in Weimar, Germany on 14 June 1800. The play formed the basis for Donizetti's opera Maria Stuarda (1835).
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Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company is a non-profit theatre company located at 641 D Street NW in the Penn Quarter neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1980, it produces new plays which it believes to be edgy, challenging, and thought-provoking. Performances are in a 265-seat courtyard-style theater.
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Maria Stuart may refer to:
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