Invisible Theatre News

Tucson Weekly : Arts : Love With Strings : PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 28, 2008: Love With Strings Strong casting and attractive characters lead Invisible Theatre's 'Natives' to success By JAMES REEL Our heroine is turning 50. She's divorced; her daughters have grown up and gone off on their own adventures; she's got tenure; she's free and more or less secure: It's time for an adventure of her own. She arranges to sublet her apartment and run off to Provence for a summer of novel-writing, wine-swilling, hill-hiking and whatever else may come. What comes, though, is one daughter after another, returning home in crisis. My marriage is ending! My wedding is off! I'm having an affair with a bisexual sultan from Bali! I'm a lesbian! It's the return of the natives who, disregarding Thomas Wolfe, believe they can come home again. Our heroine's predicament--whether to stay home and coddle her daughters, or set off on her own journey--is the subject of the ...

When 'Natives' come home www.tucsoncitizen.com ® Published: 02.28.2008 When 'Natives' come home CHUCK GRAHAM Tucson Citizen Growing up is never easy. And apparently, it is never over. Invisible Theatre brings us the new play "Natives" by Janet Neipris, teasingly borrowed from Thomas Hardy's novel "The Return of the Native." Both explore the chaos of what can happen when your adult children come back unexpectedly to the native land where they grew up - ie., your house. Of course, they still think it is also their house. So from your point of view, when does their house finally become your house? Will it ever completely become your house? In the play's often hilarious dialogue tinged with the harsh bite of reality, one daughter reminds us, "home is that place where, when you go there, they have to take you in." But in today's aggressive society of overachievers, everybody is determined to keep moving up. Nobody wants a home with ...

Daughters move in, and the laughs ensue www.azstarnet.com ® Daughters move in, and the laughs ensue By Kathleen Allen Arizona Daily Star Tucson, Arizona Published: 02.22.2008 OK, here's a really scary statistic: According to the Census Bureau, more than 22 million adult children live with one or both parents. That has the potential for disaster, as we learn in Janet Neipris' "Natives," which Invisible Theatre opened Wednesday. Viola — named after an instrument in the New York Philharmonic — is the divorced matriarch of a family of three grown daughters who descend on her New York City brownstone the summer of 1994. They all pile into Viola's place about three weeks before she is set to head off for France for the summer. It's her big adventure to mark her 50th birthday and a new lease on life. One daughter's marriage is breaking up; the other is pregnant by a bisexual man from the Bronx who lays claim to the title of "sultan," though they all sus...

Playwright: 'Natives' serious comedy www.azstarnet.com ® Published: 02.15.2008 Playwright: 'Natives' serious comedy By Sherilyn Forrester SPECIAL TO THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR New York playwright Janet Neipris has three grown daughters. So does Vi, the central character of her play "Natives," which the Invisible Theatre opens next week. In the play, Vi's three crisis-plagued daughters return home unceremoniously, expecting Vi to change her plans to sublet her apartment and spend a summer in France because of their needs to be back in their mother's nest. Hmmm. Might this play be a bit autobiographical, we asked Neipris in a recent phone conversation? "No, not really," she says laughing. "It certainly contains emotional truth. And some of the characters are suggested by friends or folks I'm acquainted with. But my children made me swear they and their lives would not be represented in this play. "What I did want to explore was how so...

Tucson Weekly : Arts : Comedy That's Real PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 14, 2008: Comedy That's Real Janet Neipris' mother-daughter play 'Natives' opens at Invisible Theatre By JAMES REEL Janet Neipris got a late start as a playwright--she was already raising three kids--and she worried that she'd be at a disadvantage. "I didn't want to write comedies," she says. "I thought that as a woman, I'd be taken as a lightweight writer." So she wrote serious plays, political plays, including one inspired by three months she'd spent teaching in China in 1988; authorities shut down a production in China after a single performance. (They've at least given the OK for another production this May.) And yet, humor had often been an element in her work, so ultimately, she felt compelled to let it out in full force. "I decided that if I was going to write a comedy," she says, "I'd write the best one I could." It would have to b...