About This Show
Alan Bennett’s award-winning series of solo pieces, Talking Heads, is a classic of contemporary theater, universally acclaimed for its combination of razor-sharp wit and deeply felt humanity. With subtle and unexpectedly poignant humor, Talking Heads illuminates lower middle-class lives in Northern England through quiet, exquisitely modulated exercises in dramatic irony. These humorous and enlightening portraits confirm Bennett’s place as one of the most gifted, versatile, and important writers in the English language. The production is directed by TheaterWorks’ Artistic Director, Steve Campo.
The first of the Talking Heads monologues is “Bed Among the Lentils,” a wickedly biting tale about Susan, a vicar’s sexually bored, alcoholic wife whose adulterous affair with a gentle Indian shopkeeper turns out to be her salvation. “A Chip in the Sugar” is a portrait of Graham, a repressed homosexual who dotes on his elderly mother and refuses to deal with his own emotional problems. But when his mum takes up with an ancient admirer, Graham’s carefully controlled existence is thrown into disarray. In “A Lady of Letters”, Miss Ruddock, the neighborhood busybody, writes letters of complaint on anything that offends her ridiculous standards. Her brazen correspondence lands her in jail where, ironically, she discovers a happy alternative to her previous existence.
No matinee performance April 2. There are also Sunday evening performances on May 1, 8, and 15 at 7:30 p.m.