Illusion Theater's 2011 Lights Up! Series offers inventive "romcom" adaptation of Moliere classic

(Minneapolis) -- The Illusion Theater’s Light House Group presents a new version of Molière’s Le Misanthrope to lighten and brighten up Minnesota’s dark days of winter. Adapted and directed by Eric Powell Holm, Misanthrope, or the Impossible Lovers is the story of a couple whose passion is unparalleled, but whose personalities are always at odds. The sixth annual Lights Up! production is on stage at the Illusion, 528 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis, January 20-23, 2011.

Misanthrope, or the Impossible Lovers (based on the full French title, Le Misanthrope ou l'Atrabilaire Amoureux) is a swift, no-holds-barred rendition, created and performed with only four actors. This clever reworking lifts the veil off Molière’s masterpiece where the hopeless couple locks horns in one of literature's funniest breakups; a play that, along with Shakespeare’s works, helped invent the modern romantic comedy.

Over the course of one drunken fateful night, young lovers Alceste and Celimene, both unbending in complex and distinct ways, search for some compromise that will save their faltering relationship, but they’re beset on all sides by well-meaning friends, potential lovers, sabotaging enemies and their own resolute natures.

Holm’s Misanthrope aims to celebrate Molière’s style of rhyming couplets and strict poetic meter, while indulging in a decadent and chaotic environment. Breana Jarvis and Brendan Frost star as the impossible lovers with Isabel K. Nelson and Matt "Sass" Spring taking on the six other characters.

His adaptation premiered to critical acclaim in 2009 with the Vintage Theater Collective in Chicago, where Chicago Tribune reviewer Kerry Reid said, “I was bowled over by Eric Powell Holm's savvy, imaginative and wholly American take...sparkling staging [and] quicksilver comic timing...It's stripped down, it's taut and it delivers a much bigger wallop than expected.”

“I am very excited to be working with Eric Holm and his company of young actors on this year's Lights Up! program,” said the Light House Group’s Founder and Producing Director Ellen Fenster. “I love Eric's knowledge of and passion for the classics and the way he twists them for a modern audience. This adaptation is really fresh and flirty while staying true to the feel of the original.”

Ticket & Address Information
Single tickets for Misanthrope, or the Impossible Lovers are $15 and are now on sale at the Illusion Theater Box Office at 612-339-4944 or online at www.illusiontheater.org. Groups of 10 or more are eligible for a group discount and should call the box office to make reservations.

The theater is located on the 8th floor in the Hennepin Center for the Arts at 528 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis. The building is on the corner of 6th Street and Hennepin Avenue, just one block from Metro Transit's Hiawatha Light-Rail Line. 

Performance Schedule
Thursday, January 20 at 8 p.m.
Friday, January 21 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, January 22 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, January 23 at 8 p.m.

About the Light House Group
The Light House Group is committed to producing the work of young and emerging artists, encouraging theater artists to form new collaborations, and offering opportunities to theater artists to explore creatively outside of their established disciplines. Founding members are Nathan Christopher, Ellen Fenster, Katie Guentzel, Lindsay Hinman Marcy and Claudia Vazquez.

The genesis for the Light House Group was an invitation extended to Illusion Artistic Associate Ellen Fenster by Illusion Producing Directors Michael Robins and Bonnie Morris. Robins and Morris wanted to offer an opportunity to young theater artists who, like themselves, were actors interested not only acting, but in creating and developing new work.

2011 marks the sixth year of the Lights Up! Series. In 2006, Nathan Christopher’s Silent and the Bloo Loons and Trust by Carston Turner premiered. The second year, the Light House Group presented Anton Jones’s Tokens-n-Change and Steve Mould’s The Entirely Unexpected Yet Somewhat Inevitable Rise to Power of Count Theodore Thomas Timothy Von Rollo the Third (in Two Parts). In 2008, the Light House Group presented Tim Cameron’s dance Public Exercise, Noah Bremer’s Untitled Duet with Houseplant, and Cory Hinkle’s play Cipher. In 2009, the company produced Nathan Christopher’s site-specific play The Flickering Wall in the closets and corridors of the Illusion Theater. Last year, the Light House Group presented A Candid World by Dawn Brodey, directed by Ellen Fenster, and Ten Reasons Why I’d Be a Bad Porn Star, written and performed by May Lee-Yang and directed by Molly Van Avery.

Ellen Fenster and Nathan Christopher serve as Producing Directors for the 2011 Lights Up! Series.