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It's "Play ball!" for the 2010 season at Emergent Arts.

Aren't you ready for summer already? I know, it wasn't such a bad winter so far, but enough already. It's COLD.

I just got word we have the rights for the very popular comedy

Bleacher Bums

by Joe Mantegna, Dennis Franz, Stuart Gordon, Richard Fire, and other members of the Organic Theatre, about those ne'er-do-well Cubbies and their never-give-up fans. Should be just the ticket for a perfect Memorial Day weekend.

Opening Day is May 27th (don't worry, it's an off night for the Tigers) and continuing through Sunday the 30th (the Tigers are playing, but hey, it's only Oakland).

Get your special

Early Bird tickets now at Recession Recovery price of $10 each!

Just click HERE.

Do you have a baseball story or anecdote? Submit it to us at
info@emergentarts.com (in the body of your e-mail, preferably) and we will consider it for posting on our Green Room page. Best Chicago Cubbies or Detroit Tigers anecdote will win the writer 4 free tickets to Bleacher Bums!

Bleacher Bums and the Summer of 98

Mark McGwire was our Golden Boy. Sammy Sosa was the Noble Knight from Fawlty Towers, ready to battle but doomed to ignominious Second Place. It was the summer of 1998, baseball's Summer of Love, when all the history and nostalgia of America's National Pastime exploded in a rivalry that hadn't been seen since Maris' run for the record in 1961. And in Chicago, a town not famous for placing first, but notorious for putting everything on the line, a rowdy and eclectic crowd of die hards populated the bleachers at Wrigley Field. The home run race was a bonus in their world. Their focus was exclusively on the Cubbies, and the Cubbies could do no wrong, because no matter what, they would one day do the unimaginable, and win, and then the world would reassert itself on its axis, and baseball would once again make sense. Because everybody knows, the Chicago Cubs are Kings of all they survey. And what they survey, more than anything else, is baseball, and all things baseball, and every blessed thing pertaining to baseball. So say the Bleacher Bums.

In “Bleacher Bums”, those die hard fans are at last given their voice. No matter what your allegiance, you will recognize the passion and the love for the game, and the fun we all experience when we go to the ballpark to root for our team. The sidebets, the razzing, the unadulterated bonding across genders and generations, the outright pleasure we take in rooting for a bunch of dedicated sports gods to annihilate the sports gods of another tribe is both celebrated and lampooned in this most liberating of sports comedies.

And, there's a babe in a bikini.

What else could you want? Baseball, an epic home run showdown, and attractive women in bikinis in the bleacher section? The only things lacking are Devil Dogs, cheep beer, and Harry Carey. And we're working on that. And, of course, a priest to bless the proceedings.

Tim Henning

Director

Emergent Arts

If you would like to help out in any way with an Emergent Arts production, please contact me through the contact page on this website or just e-mail info@emergentarts.com.  

Please contribute

There are lots of organizations in need of your donations, and I know you hear from them often in these days of reduced aid to arts groups, etc. Emergent Arts is not yet a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization, but we do need assistance. We are providing a way for fans of Emergent Arts to contribute, in order that we can continue to provide high quality theatrical entertainment to our region. If you like what we do, and you want to keep on seeing it, please go to the following link and let us know with your contributions. Thanks!

     Read the review of our last show at AnnArbor.com here!

Waiting For Godot by Samuel Beckett*

...is over. So sad, nothing to be done.

Thanks to all the actors, volunteers, people who came to see it. We have kept our appointment. How many people can say that?

Steve Elliott as Estragon and Larry Rusinsky as Vladimir in Waiting For Godot.

Photos by Tim Henning

    Two men, two companions, shabby in dress, having perhaps seen more genteel times, waiting for a third, find themselves caught in the fabric, somewhere between the thread of time and the stitching of place. The thread of tragedy and the stitching of comedy. The thread of memory and the stitching of ... Great Caesar's Ghost! What are they caught up in??

    Since it's debut in the late 40s, early 50s, Waiting For Godot has been intriguing, mystifying, entertaining, irritating, elevating and enthralling audiences around the world. Is it a tragedy? Is it a comedy? The author, Samuel Beckett labelled it both, and so it is, a work that exploded what theatre was supposed to be, leaving in the aftermath fresh ground for everything new that came after.

    The two companions, Vladimir and Estragon, banter and cajole, provoke and soothe, firing off words like weapons in a determined and often impetuous assault on meaninglessness. Partially inspired by Beckett's fondness for the music hall comedians and film stars of the 20s, they draw us into their existential two-man act, like Laurel and Hardy on acid. They make us laugh (that's the comedy part) and in the aching moments between the laughs, we suddenly see ourselves, trapped, waiting for something, almost anything to really happen, but fated by our very nature not to be able to escape (that's the tragedy part), and so we keep the ball in the air, keep things going, spin the plates, poke each other in the eye, wrestle, challenge, argue, change our shoes, pee in the bushes, just in case in doing so we stumble across some meaning, something to hold on to. At least we're doing something. As David Letterman might say, "That's definitely something." Right?

    And then, just as we have it in our hands, that magical elemental glowingly profound thing, it blows up like a lit bomb in the face of Wile E. Coyote. And that, tragic as it may seem to the Coyote, you gotta admit, is also pretty funny.

    Don't worry, though, there are no bombs in this production. Only the funniest show about nothing since Seinfeld. Well, actually,a long time before Seinfeld. And a long time after. And I hear Godot might put in a special appearance to do the Elaine dance.

Quotes about  the play:

But you can expect witness to the strange power this drama has to convey the impression of some melancholy truths about the hopeless destiny of the human race. Mr. Beckett is an Irish writer who has lived in Paris for years, and once served as secretary to James Joyce.

Since "Waiting for Godot" has no simple meaning, one seizes on Mr. Beckett's experience of two worlds to account for his style and point of view. The point of view suggests Sartre--bleak, dark, disgusted. The style suggests Joyce--pungent and fabulous. Put the two together and you have some notion of Mr. Beckett's acrid cartoon of the story of mankind.

                                         -Brooks Atkinson (From original review of New York                                                 production in New York Times, 1954)

* Produced by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service.

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