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The Prime of
Miss Jean Brodie
Feb 4-19, 2005
Friday, Feb 4 at 8 pm
Saturday, Feb 5 at 8 pm
Friday, Feb 11 at 8 pm
Saturday, Feb 12 at 8 pm
Sunday, Feb 13 at 2:30 pm
Thursday, Feb 17 at 8 pm
Friday, Feby 18 at 8 pm
Saturday, Feb 19 at 8 pm

Dowload a PDF of the Program

Articles
The Times, Feb 4

A CAPTIVATING EXPERIENCE

By Jay Allen, From the Novella by Muriel Spark
Directed by Deborah Weiss
Assisted by Greg Pachnik and Fred Margison

Bitter, brilliant, funny and sad, this adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novella is as timely as ever. The story of a charismatic Scottish schoolteacher whose influence over her bedazzled students leads to tragedy was last performed by CTG in the 1984-85 season.

Join us after the show for an Opening Night Gala
Friday, Febraury 3, 2005
hosted by dish restaurant
at 3907 N. Calumet Ave., Valparaiso

Please Note: This play involves mature themes.

Synopsis
A liberated young schoolteacher at an Edinburgh girls’ school in the period between the two wars, instructs her girls on the ways of life. Ignoring the more mundane subjects, she teaches them of love, politics and art. Her affairs with two male teachers become known and she finds herself fighting to keep her job. She believes that she can always count on the 100% support of her favourite pupils, but one of them does not feel that Miss Jean Brodie is in her “prime” any more. No longer swayed by her teacher’s eloquence, she begins to learn about life and love herself.

Director's Corner from Deborah Weiss
Jay Allen's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is based on a novella by the Scottish writer Muriel Spark, whose uncanny--and strangely compassionate--observations of human frailty, along with her profound fascination with issues of good and evil, have made her one of the most renowned authors of the past half-century. "In her prime" when she wrote Brodie, she is now nearly 90--still writing, still baffling and delighting her readers with unexpected excursions into the outlands of the human soul.

I love this play for a simple reason: I love it because it is not simple. The play's most attractive character is also its most profoundly destructive, while the "heroes" of the play are complicated people whose best and highest motives are wrapped into intricate layers of envy and despair. Miss Brodie is in fact a cult leader--a fascist, a romantic, whose gorgeous eccentricity and force of personality combine to lead her Little Girls into the realm of tragedy. Yet because wickedness itself is not simple, she never understands what she has done; she believes to the end that she is a Teacher and that she has been betrayed. And because virtue is no simple thing either, it takes one of her most damaged students many years and a ferocious act of penance to begin to achieve a kind of peace.

Ovations!
4th Street Theatre
Mike Laughner, Golf Pro, Robbinhurst Golf Club
Memorial Opera House

And all the other generous people who helped make this production possible!