Montclair Based Theater Company Presents 'Space In-Between'

Enjoy an evening of short plays that explores the relationships between people and the spaces that divide them. Space In-Between offers an intimate evening of theater for four actors, two women and two men, staged in the round to embody the mind spaces created by French female playwrights and new novel writers Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute.

Their one-act plays “Savannah Bay” and “Over Nothing At All” capture the spaces in between the walls of our minds, in between two actors on stage, in between people of different cultures and languages and the space in between male and female worlds. Produced by Culture Connection Theater and opening January 8 Luna Stage’s Studio Theatre in West Orange, NJ, but formerly in Montclair.

Savannah Bay by Marguerite Duras evokes the fierceness and the gentleness of a relationship between an older woman and a younger one as they accompany each other through a memory filled landscape of the mind. The older woman, an aging grande dame actress, wishes both to forget and to retain her memories while the younger woman needs to discover herself through the older woman’s tenuously failing memory.

Over afternoon tea, the two women remember a girl who died in a warm sea in Indochina many years before and retell her story of impossible love. They are sustained through their shared connection to this girl and to each other. Writer Marguerite Duras, best known for her hauntingly beautiful and scandalous novel The Lover, for which she won the Prix Goncourt, brings her trademark poetic, impressionistic language and themes of the passion of impossible love, loss, regret and memory to this delicate play.

Over Nothing At All by Nathalie Sarraute explores the hidden competition between two life-long male friends, one a successful academic, the other a frustrated poet, who have a falling out seemingly over nothing at all, and who call in two neighbors as jurors to make a judgment on their case. As their dispute progresses, a subtext of condescension, jealousy and mutual envy surfaces, covered up by years of proclaiming their enduring friendship. Nathalie Sarraute, a pioneer of the new novel, uses what she calls “tropisms” or everyday phrases to explore a hidden underworld of internal voices who howl with fear and pain at having to confront the public exterior world. In Sarraute’s play, the characters attempt to speak the unspeakable and barely knowable. What seems minimal at first is revealed to be enormous in dramatic tension and personal implications for both of the men and their relationship to one another.

Space In-Between: One acts by French female playwrights Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute will be presented at Luna Stage’s Studio Theatre, at 555 Valley Road, at West Orange, NJ.

The production previews on Wednesday, January 7 and opens on Thursday January 8 at 8:00 p.m. Regular performances run January 9, 10, 14, 15, 16 and 17 at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, January 11 at 7:00 p.m. There will be two Saturday matinees on January 10 and 17 at 3:00 p.m.

Tickets are $20.00 for general admission, $10.00 for students and $15.00 for groups of 10 or more. Tickets are available in advance only. For reservations call Brown Paper Tickets at 1-800-838-3006, ext. 1 or go to http://spaceinbetween.brownpapertickets.com.

Image and information courtesy of Culture Connection Theater