Stoppard – Durang: Two Modern One Act Comedies

CenterStage in Lake Forest has scoured both sides of the Atlantic to bring you the greatest masterpieces of Twentieth Century comedy!

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the rights, so we had to make do with Tom Stoppard and Christopher Durang.

From England comes an early Tom Stoppard masterpiece, The Real Inspector Hound.  A murder mystery wrapped around an affectionate parody of Agatha Christie’s long-running play, The Mousetrap, The Real Inspector Hound demonstrated the precocious brilliance of Stoppard’s long career.

Not content to simply offer a “play within a play”, we cross the Atlantic to showcase Christopher Durang’s dizzying comic conceit of a play within a play within a play, The Actor’s Nightmare.  Our hapless hero finds himself finds himself unable to remember his lines, his play, or even whether he’s an actor at all.