The first season of Tantrum Theater will feature the musical Little Shop of Horrors, Athens original Tammy Faye’s Final Audition and Irish playwright’s Dancing at Lughnasa.
Happiness is at the core of the inaugural season of Tantrum Theater.
The new theater company will perform cult classic musical Little Shop of Horrors, local playwright’s Tammy Faye’s Final Audition and Irish playwright’s Dancing at Lughnasa. All of the plays will be performed at the Abbey Theater in the Dublin Community Recreation Center in Dublin, Ohio. Tickets will go on sale in the beginning of March.
“(The plays) are three incredibly different shows and that is by design,” Dan Dennis, artistic director of Tantrum Theater, said. “We’re really interested in these three different ways of asking this question of how do we find happiness. … What makes you happy and how is happiness often a negotiation?”
Written by local playwright Merri Biechler, Tammy Faye’s Final Audition focuses on famed televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker Messner at the end of her life as she reviews her past relationships with the men in her life, God and her audience.
“Tammy Faye’s Final Audition is an important play because as artists, Tantrum will be uniquely poised to produce new work, and including this play affirms this commitment,” Rachel Cornish, interim producing director of Tantrum Theater and director of external relations for the College of Fine Arts, said in an email.
The comedy horror musical Little Shop of Horrors follows flower clerk Seymour who is in love with co-worker Audrey and discovers an “unusual plant” that feeds off human blood and flesh, which he calls Audrey II.
Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa is a memory play in which one son recounts his childhood with his mother and her four sisters.
The three-week performance of Dancing at Lughnasa will coincide with the Dublin Irish Festival, which is the largest three-day Irish festival, according to its website. The hope, Dennis said, is that the play will be considered as another part of the festival, part of which takes place near the Dublin Community Recreation Center.
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Most importantly, Dennis said, the season lineup will deal with how Ohio University and Tantrum Theater can connect with the Dublin audience.
“So thinking about things like politics, values, questions that people have on their mind about their lives — These are all good things that theater can do,” Dennis, a visiting professor of voice and movement, said. “How do we create community? It’s particularly important because we are attempting to become members of a new community.”
Auditions for the Tantrum season will coincide with the traditional auditions for the mainstage productions for Fall Semester 2016. Those dates have not yet been set.
Colin Cardille, a junior studying performance and production, technology and design, said he is excited to audition, especially with the inclusion of a musical in the lineup. He added that he is also excited for his classmates because of how many roles there are for women in the season.
Mixing professional and student talent is another crucial component of Tantrum as a professional theater company. Thus, Dennis said Tantrum will work with several theater unions, such as Actors’ Equity Association and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.
To do so, Dennis said he will be reaching out to his and his colleagues’ resources and connections.
Cardille is excited to work with those professionals because he said their feedback is received differently than that from professors, which can sometimes feel just like homework.
Acquiring a venue and finalizing the OU-Dublin partnership delayed establishing a season lineup, but Dennis said in the future, season planning would start in mid-summer.
Dennis said he is excited for the different opportunity that Dublin will provide, calling it a “missing piece” that will serve the university differently than how Monomoy did.
Cardille, who performed at Monomoy for a season, said current students are accepting of Tantrum.
“With a new grad class and mostly new undergrads, everyone is starting to learn that Tantrum is the theater we have,” he said. “We passed off the stick, and we’re going to start our own race.”
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