RUFFLES OR, A PROGRESSION OF RAKES
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY NORMANDY SHERWOOD
OCT 10 - 21, 2018
ABOUT THE SHOW
In a corridor haunted by wronged maidservants, a stable boy (Ruffles) considers the ways he is becoming bad because of the things his new job asks him to do. As a progression of rakes, profligates and libertines drink more liqueurs and vomit in the decorative urns, one rake reflects on his dawning consciousness that his actions harm others. He tells the audience: "I want to let you know that none of this is my fault. Not exactly. Its not like I want to do these things. It’s just, I dont know, I do them?" Ruffles, or, a Progression of Rakes is a meditation on power, consent and how to be a person, that is, a good person.
PRESS
REVIEW: Onstage Blog
REVIEW: My Entertainment World
PRESS RELEASE: Broadway World
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Normandy Sherwood (Playwright/Director) is theater maker: playwright, costumer, director, performer. Her plays have been presented at The New Ohio (Theater Madame Lynch; Feather Gatherers), The Kitchen (The Golden Veil), The Brick (Permanent Caterpillar), Rubulad (Tiny Hornets and Mending) and more. Her theater company, The Drunkards Wife, creates spectacles with no-wave inflected music and a generous, maximalist design sense. She was a lead artist of the OBIE-award-winning National Theater of the United States of America (2000-2017, R.I.P.). She has participated in residencies at Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Millay Colony, University Settlement and more. She is a fellow in the 2018 Target Margin Theater Institute. As a costume designer she has worked with Rachel Chavkin, Kristin Marting, Mac Wellman, Young Jean Lee, Half Straddle, Faye Driscoll and more. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at NYU. MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College.
The Drunkard's Wife is a theater company led by Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin that creates theatrical and musical spectacles in New York City. Our mission is to create and produce experimental musical plays and site-specific theatrical environments with a generous, maximalist design sense. Our plays are darkly comic, language-drunk, full of reverence for the hand-made and therefore wholeheartedly feminist and anticapitalistic. We are drawn to represent festivals and celebrations in our work, as well as complex moments of moral and emotional ambiguity. As such, our theatrical style combines our impulses towards camp, the carnivalesque, and the maximal with an appetite for subtlety, complex argument and tenderness. We make music that draws from folk mountain music traditions and no-wave dissonance, and that incorporates complex time signatures and improvisation. www.thedrunkardswife.com