The Beggar’s Opera

Aisling Arts, Inc. presents a new adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera, conceived, written, and directed by Bryn Manion and performed by the Aisling Arts Ensemble. This is a non-musical, full force re-envisioning of the play from a woman’s perspective. While maintaining a social conscience consistent with John Gay’s original, Manion brings this classic to subtler ground, where gender defines the stakes of living in a world where the line between right and wrong is never clear and ever evaporating.

Polly Peachum is an odd sort of mathematician. Bound to her position as a counter clerk in her brother’s antique shop, she forlornly clicks the days away on one of the many abaci adorning the shop’s interior. This all changes one dead winter day when an enigmatic stranger named Macheath sweeps into the shop and offers Polly freedom. She elopes with him and sets the world as she knows it into a precarious state of imbalance. Swept away in a current of miasma darker than she’s ever imagined, Polly falls into the mercurial grip of a villain who will pull her strings even as he awakens her dreams.

There is no evening performance April 12.