Beacon - You don’t have to go to Broadway to see great theater; it’s right here at the Howland Cultural Center! On Saturday, February 20th, at 8:00 p.m., Rodney Douglas and his highly acclaimed New Day Repertory Theatre will present Edward Albee’s brilliant play, "At Home at the Zoo". The three-times Pulitzer Prize winner, Albee first wrote this play as "The Zoo Story" and then revisited it some forty years later to rewrite the first act and renamed the play "At Home at the Zoo." "Like all of Albee’s work, "At Home at the Zoo" takes an unflinching look at the modern human condition with his incisive language, signature rhythms, and unexpected revelations. Albee has created a truly bold and moving evening of theater." Critics say "Brilliant! The work has bark and bite." (Variety); "A darkly comic and thrilling glimpse of characters, smashed up against the bars of social convention and their secret, suppressed identities. Welcome to his world!" (Time Out New York); "Tense, truthful, and hypnotic." (New York Daily News)
"The 81-year old Albee has long been acknowledged as the leading American playwright of the post-Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller generation while never losing a kind of enfant terrible aura."
The distinguished New Day Repertory Theater is celebrated for provocative and innovative theater. "It continues to offer the best committed theater in the Mid-Hudson area." (K. Montgomery). Under its founder and CEO, Rodney Douglas, the New Day throughout its fifty years of operation has trained and coached hundreds of beginners and professionals, providing a start for many, some of whom have been very successful and others who are now quite famous. Douglas states, "It is our conviction that the Theater, in particular, can be a most effective medium in bringing together people of all levels of society under a common bond of human relations. Culture is a rare phenomenon. On the one hand, it is the way of life of a people and on the other, it is an institution, multifaceted in that it educates, cultivates, entertains, and sustains the mind, and we had better be mindful of our development, knowing that whatever the minds is fed that is what it will thrive upon…..We learn a lot about ‘a people’ through their culture and art, and the theater in particular, with its varied components, has the potential more so than language to translate any culture with the greatest impact and clarity."
The New Day Repertory is funded, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts’ Special Arts Services and Theater Departments, and by the Dutchess County Arts Council.
For further information and/or directions, please call the Howland Cultural Center at (845) 831-4988. The Center is located at the east end of Main Street (477) in Beacon, NY.
