Opening night is here for Blackbird Theater’s production of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, with the first show Friday at 7:30 p.m. in Shamblin Theatre.
The Lipscomb and Nashville community is promised a show with romance, comedy, witty women and deep, philosophical conversations about the reasons of human existence. Possibly between the characters and the devil himself, with a few pieces by composer Berlioz playing on the side.
Blackbird Theater’s founders Wes Driver and Greg Greene waste no breath when picking their plays for each season by finding unique shows to “thrill” the audience to inspire and create “intellectually stimulating” conversation. To create such conversations takes months of planning and script adjustments, many staff and cast meetings and weeks of rehearsal.
Cast member and junior acting major Austin Hunt says that some of the characters’ monologues are up to “three to four pages long.”
Show director Beki Baker has been working hard on this show since this last summer where she and her dramaturge, junior theatre major Emily Eytchison, studied Shaw’s Man and Superman.
Eytchison said that they would study the time period in which Man and Superman takes place, “find the important bits and put it together for the actors” to help further character development. “The dramaturge is going to be the one who spends all their printing quota on scholarly articles,” Eytchison added, “and that dramaturge may or may not have spent most of it all in one day.”
In Baker’s Directorial Statement, she compliments Shaw’s intelligence within his work, as well as his comedic wit. Aiming to explore the purpose of humanity in this universe, and our understanding of it, or lack there-of.
“There is a mystery to the universe, and we can never stop being creatures with subjective viewpoints,” Baker remarks in her statement.
The show will continue through Feb. 2.
Visit Blackbird’s website for more details and tickets.