Jeremy Tow

Welcome! It’s a great joy, as the artistic director of the island’s only fully professional classics based Theatre Company, to direct the first ever production of a “new” classic, A Perfect Wife. Premieres of new scripts are sometimes a bit daunting, but when the new play includes the witty dialogue of Shaw, the hilarious characters of Chekhov, and the smart banter of Trevanian, I have no fears. And if I did, they were allayed by the overwhelmingly positive response that the members gave to the script last fall. One of the perks of membership is that every October we provide lunch and a reading of a play that will be produced in the upcoming season. Last October, approximately 100 members joined

myself, and four brilliantly talented actors for an exciting “cold read” of this script. The room was filled with delicious smells, witty dialogue, and uproarious laughter, and the overwhelming response from nearly everyone in the room was, “WE LOVE IT!”

So here we are: the premiere production. Bringing a script to life on stage is exciting, challenging, and unique to each story that we tell. The play that you are about to see is a farcical comedy. The story is a progression of insights into the unlikely and improbable twists and turns that love takes from one generation of women to the next. We travel from a large manor house in 1865 Russia, to a horse drawn carriage and a steam train in 1899 France. Then, on to a luxury cruise liner on the Red Sea in 1928 that drops us in a village shop on the Wiltshire Downs of England. Our last stop is a large farm in Saskatchewan, circa 1955.

Our scenery designer has done a brilliant job of taking the script (along with my images) and creating a classic festival set (with a twist) that will allow us to travel from one location to another. I gave him words like madcap, spiraling, shooting stars, unbalanced, catapulted across a great big world…and he has brought us a palate to play on that is vibrant, bold…with shapes that suggest femininity and grace: tilting curves, the moon…and the top of a woman’s dressing table. With the help of our lighting and sound designers, you will be transported from one time period to another: from a horse drawn carriage on the Paris streets, to the brilliance of a starry night in the Pyrenees…hold on to your seats.

And the costumes! Our designer has outdone herself to not only transport us to each period, but also to tie together the lives of our mad capped ginger-haired Russian temptress with her daughter in France, her granddaughter in England and her great-granddaughter in Saskatchewan.

Enjoy…not only the physical comedy and the farce, but listen to the language: the theatre is our last refuge of smart, witty, and intelligent language based comedies. And for that, I make no apologies. As the character “He” says in Act II:

I’m not ashamed to admit that my play was a farce. A tightly written, uproariously funny farce, as a matter of fact.