Award winning Master & Margarita at The Edmonton Fringe Festival
Along with The Fever by Wallace Shaw, Seattle’s Theater Simple will take their award-winning original adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s acclaimed novel The Master & Margarita to The Edmonton Fringe Festival next month. N.B. The Edmonton Fringe Festival is the largest in the North America.
Originally created in 1997, The Master &Margarita has toured to sell-out engagements at Fringe Festivals in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Victoria and Vancouver, made an SRO appearance on the Bagley Wright stage at Seattle Repertory Theater during Bumbershoot, played to sold out houses at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, where it was named Best Play of the ’98 season.
M&M has been Theater Simple’s most requested work.
Written between secretly between 1932-1939, the novel concerns a visit by the devil to Moscow during the highly repressive 1930’s, when Bulgakov was working as a playwright and play adaptor. The Master and Margarita is a satirical look at the literary élites and how they wrote propaganda for the regime ( and re-wrote history) Since it deals with morality in the political sphere, it is ripe for re-examination. Like in Stalin’s Soviet Union, when the left, who had fought against Tsarist censorship, started becoming as repressive as the Tsarists, all was lost. There are parallels today when the looney left becomes as censorious as the ancien régime in France.
Theater Simple’s production shakes up a philosophical Molotov cocktail with shots of magical realism, vaudeville, the Bible and live music in this original adaptation of Bulgakov’s final masterpiece. Banned then censored for over 30 years, it has become one of the most influential novels of modern Russia.
THE FEVER
Performed by Theater Simple co-founder and artistic instigator Llysa Holland, and directed by M. Burke Walker, founder of Seattle’s Empty Space Theatre, The Fever examines what it means to try to live in the world as a good, moral person, if in fact, one even can, post-9/11. Obie-winning playwright and actor Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with Andre, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Star Trek:Deep Space Nine) originally performed The Fever in the living rooms of his friends in New York in 1991
Deliriously ill, the speaker is alone in a hotel in a poor foreign country during a ‘small’ civil war…Speaking directly to the audience, The Fever is the literal friction of conflicting ideas, the fever being both physical and emotional. An acute look at an ethical and philosophical awakening, arguing between being the ‘good person’ one believes one is, and the dawning understanding of the cost of justifying living a comfortable life in this world.
If you decide to go to the Fringe Festival, you can also visit scenic Banff, in the Rocky Mountains. It is as breathtaking as Theater Simple’s productions.
Master & Margarita plus The Fever. Theater Simple. Edmonton Fringe Festival, Aug. 15-25.
La Cité Francophone – 8627 91 Street, Edmonton, Alberta CANADA T6C3N1
Aug 15 (Th) 8:00 pm
Aug 16 (Fr) 3:30 pm
Aug 17 (Sa) 9:30 pm
Aug 18 (Su) 6 pm
Aug 19 (Mo) 3:45 pm
Aug 21 (We) 5:45 pm
Aug 22 (Th) 3:30 pm
Aug 23 (Fr) 6 pm
Aug 24 (Sa – CLOSING) 1:45 pm
TIX ON SALE 8/7/19 $13 Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Info: https://theatersimple.org/the-master-margarita Edmonton Fringe Festival https://fringefestivals.com/festival/edmonton-international-fringe-theatre-festival/