Regional Competitors

Blood Brothers is the hugely popular play by the well-known author of Educating Rita, Willy Russell. It is fast-moving and perceptive, entertaining and thought-provoking, funny yet ultimately tragic. It tells the tale of twin brothers who are born into a large working-class family and what happens when their mother decides to have one of them adopted. Blood Brothers looks at the differences and conflicts of their upbringings, their relationships with each other and with their real and adopted mothers.

Big Love is a play by American playwright Charles L. Mee. Based on Aeschylus's The Supplicants, it is about fifty brides who flee to a manor in Italy to avoid marrying their fifty cousins. The play takes the plot of the original Greek play into modern times, including such details as having the grooms ambush the brides by helicopter. While the brides and grooms wait for their wedding day, the characters raise issues of gender politics, love, and domestic violence.

Paganini is a dark comedy by Don Nigro. It is the tale of a man so gifted in playing the violin that people believed he made a pact with the devil.

The Marriage of Bette and Boo is a dark comedy: A woman gives birth to four successive stillborn babies, each of whom is unceremoniously dumped on to the hospital floor by the obstetrician. There are onstage deaths by stroke and by cancer. One character is an alcoholic, another a psychotic, another senile. And heaven help those who seek solace from the neighborhood priest. As Father Donnallyexplains, he is powerless to do anything except ''mumble platitudes'' to the ''stupid people'' who come to him with ''insoluble problems.''