
Four of a Kind: One Pinter, One Ionesco, A Beckett and A Durang
by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Christopher Durang and Eugène Ionesco
L'Etage Cabaret
September 5 - 14, 2007
Directed by Tina Brock

Director
Tina Brock
Anna Vallejo
Melissa Black
Sound Design
Tina Brock
Stages Manager/Lights and Sound
Ryan McMenamin
Dramaturg/Assistant Stage Manager
Nate Black
Production Manager
Bob Schmidt
Produced by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
Playing time is 60 minutes; there will be no intermission.
Feel free to visit the bar and accommodations,
located in the lobby, throughout the show.
Reviews
Four of a Kind (2007)
"Christopher Durang's For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls is a parody of Tennessee Williams with Tina Brock particularly effective as Amanda and Dylan Clements delightfully snippy as her crippled son. Excellent casting and direction of all by Brock."
Steve Cohen, Philadelphia City Paper
"Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, specializing in Theatre of the Absurd, offers a chance to see four rarely performed little plays by four big playwrights."
Toby Zinman, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Director's Notes
September 2007
Welcome.
Thanks for spending your evening with us and for supporting the 11th annual Philadelphia Live Arts and Fringe Festival.
Four of a Kind marks the third show from the Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium since the company’s formation in May 2006.
One of the highlights of preparing for this year’s Fringe was locating (thanks to Nate Black and Len Kelly), reading, and interpreting the production notebooks Samuel Beckett kept while directing his plays in Germany and England. We spent hours drinking beer and grousing over six words -- which find their way in or out of Come & Go, depending on which version of the play you are looking at. We settled on the 127-word version, the script Beckett used in preparation for the 1978 Schiller Theatre production in Berlin.
It’s astonishing how complicated the seemingly simple can be; rehearsing Come & Go felt at times like we were wandering blindfolded in a very dense forest; we experienced what felt like familiar markers along the way, yet often left rehearsal feeling as if we hadn’t come any closer to the treasure. The more we dug into Come & Go, the more perplexed we became; the more we rehearsed it, the more we wanted to rehearse it, the more it alluded us
Working through the intricacies of Beckett’s work is relaxing, partly because it forces you to settle in, take your time and focus on the process; it requires you to sit with the discomfort and the not knowing, and the idea that the experience will be different every time.
Today, it seems there are ready solutions to every need, every problem. It’s oddly comforting to know that not everything has an answer.
Tonight’s sampler includes author Samuel Beckett and three other favorites, whose work you’ll be seeing more of in the years to come. We look forward to having you in the audience as we continue to tackle the challenges – acting, directing, designing -- these formidable authors present.
You can follow our progress by visiting our web site, by coming to see the work, by making suggestions, by volunteering your time and resources.
We hope you enjoy the show.
Tina Brock
Artistic Director
Philadelphia City Paper
by Steve Cohen
Four of a Kind: One Beckett, One Ionesco, A Pinter and A Durang
by The Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium
Part of Fringe
Running Time: 60 minutes
Four plays by four renowned authors, reviewed in 100 words? Their common thread is absurdity. "Come and Go" by Samuel Beckett presents three girlfriends with secrets. Cryptic, mysterious, brief. My favorite, "Trouble in the Works" by Harold Pinter is a hilarious confrontation between a Yorkshire factory owner and a complaining employee. Eugene Ionesco's "Foursome" puts three stubborn men through verbal gymnastics. Christopher Durang's "For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls" is a parody of Tennessee Williams with Tina Brock particularly effective as Amanda and Dylan Clements delightfully snippy as her crippled son. Excellent casting and direction of all by Brock.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
by Toby Zinman
Four of a Kind: One Beckett, One Ionesco, a Pinter and a Durang
Idiopathic Ridiculopathy Consortium, specializing in Theatre of the Absurd, offers a chance to see four rarely performed little plays by four big playwrights. Each is interesting in its own way, but they are not "four of a kind" and treating them as if they were all similar compromises each.
The funniest is Durang's "For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls," a nifty parody of Glass Menagerie (with an occasional nod to A Streetcar Named Desire). But this comes as a jarring, if entertaining, third in a program of far less comical works.
These are all about language:
Beckett's "Come and Go," is a delicate, mysterious and very brief piece; three women murmur barely audibly, barely visible in half light; there are moving moments in this, but it's too loud and too bright to work.
Pinter's "Trouble in the Works" also suffers from too much volume and too little menace; this minor sketch about a worker's rebellion in a factory depends for its humor or ridiculously named mechanical products.
Ionesco's "Foursome" is full of vaudevillian mugging as the characters accuse each other: "You don't mean what you say" and "You don't say what you mean."
Tina Brock, who clearly loves this stuff, directs all four.