Time Flies: American Style
fall, 2002

The BCC Theater Department's fall production is Time Flies: American Style, a trilogy of plays by three distinguished American playwrights: Thornton Wilder, A.R. Gurney and David Ives.

The works being performed reflect the unique vision of each playwright as they deal with the subject of living and dying and how we spend our "time" in-between. Time Flies: American Style performance dates are Thursday through Saturday, November 7th through the 9th at 8:00 PM and Sunday, November 10th at 2:00 PM.

"The previous season was so popular with audiences," said theater director Katherine Bacon, "that we decided to continue exploring the work of American playwrights." Bacon says she conceived this production in order to ". . . allow BCC theater students to experience a broad range of American playwrights' work and to understand the eras in which they wrote. Each playwright is an artist expressing the views particular to his time but these three plays demonstrate that the message is the same. Time really does fly for all of us including Wilder's symbolic characters, Gurney's real-life Mom's, Dad's and teens and Ives' lovable mayflies."

Heading off the production is Thornton Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner, written in 1931, which is a haunting study of how time passes over ninety years in the life of one family. This will be followed by A.R. Gurney's The Dining Room which was reviewed in The New York Post as " . . . hilarious and touching. . . as comic sketch crazily succeeds comic sketch, a whole pattern of American life emerges." David Ives' short but hilarious play Time Flies is an experiment in how we can identify our own fears and wishes with those of the common mayfly.

Thornton Wilder's work and views are profound andvisionary. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times -- in 1928 for thenovel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in 1938 for the ever popular play Our Town and in 1943 he won for his play The Skin of Our Teeth.

A.R. Gurney is originally from Buffalo, New York and began writing plays in the 1960s. and for four decades has been depicting American life on the stage. The offbeat and new-wave writer, David Ives, received the Outer Critics Circle's John Gassner Playwriting Award and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Play for All in the Timing.