Icarus and Aria Download Text | Reviews | Photos | Critical Preface to Published Text By Kirk Wood Bromley In the words of Aaron Beall, the original dramaturg and director: This new play, Icarus and Aria, a modern American tragedy, came about in an unusual way. Primed and a little restless, KWB and I found ourselves at loose ends post-Christmas 1996. We had a completed yet unproduced play - the sequel to Love's Labour's Lost, Life's Loss's Loved, waiting in the wings to premier Halloween of 1997 - ten months of time and the first ever New York International Fringe Festival looming before us. We were bored - as only post-suburban kids can be - and needed a challenge. KWB suggested we create a play for Fringe NYC, a tragedy of young love that had been kicking about in his head for a couple of years. Ah! Here was the sauce: write, dramaturg, cast, direct, and premier an epic tragedy in 8 months and make it glorious. January 3, 1997, we began. KWB writing four hours a day, I creating the structure for Fringe NYC and casting about for an electric ensemble to transform the words into soaring theater. Jump cut to August 14, 1997, 3 pm at the Nuyorican Poet's Café (me staging a curtain call 5 minutes before show time, actors frightened and fuming, and here we go again), a new play born into the world: Aria, Primalo, Tonka, Trinidad, Junkfood, Icarus, new characters, new words, love and death climaxing in a hail of bullets and all the action of the play taken from the news of a puzzling world - a polaroid of now. And afterwards, notes on the street, cellular phones ringing in our pockets, and beer and buffalo wings at Nice Guy Eddie's. Hi diddly dee, a theatrical life for us. - Aaron Beall, dramaturg and director, NYC, August 1997 PRODUCTION
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