Mount Royal Conservatory’s Theatre Arts Diploma program continues its 2009 / 2010 Season with Neil Simon’s coming-of-age comedy, Brighton Beach Memoirs. The production runs from February 4-6, and 9-12 in Mount Royal University’s Wright Theatre, under director and Mount Royal Conservatory faculty member J-P Fournier.

Simon’s loosely autobiographical work centers on a Jewish-American family struggling to make ends meet in late 1930’s New York. Simon’s embodiment, the pubescent Eugene, sets the comic tone with his general confusion and naiveté around his developing sexuality. His older brother, Stanley, is the foil, the voice of wisdom, whose own carnal knowledge isn’t exactly complete either.
Tickets available by calling 403.440.7770, and more information is available at www.mtroyal.ca/theatremru.

For Fournier, Eugene’s predicament is instantly relatable. While the Internet, movies and cable television have played a role in the ubiquity of sexuality we face in the modern world, the same kinds of anxiety, frustration and unexplainable urges are still faced daily by adolescents the world-over.

“It wasn’t all that long ago,” laughs Fournier, “that a group of friends and I used to sit around debating how babies were born, or, in fact, where they came from in the first place! It’s sort of a rite of passage for
teenagers.”