School for Lies Kicks off Conservatory's Season

SARASOTA – Tony award-nominee David Ives’s deliciously off-color tribute to The Misanthrope, Moliere’s brilliant 17th-century comedy of manners, will open the 2013/14 FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training's season on this week, in a regional premier of the work.

The Misanthrope concerns a bitter social critic who falls in love with the one woman who exemplifies everything he despises in modern life. According to Greg Leaming, the director of the FSU/Asolo Conservatory and of this production, the source material brims with love, sex, hypocrisy and verbal fencing matches.

Olivia Williamson, Matthew R. Olsen, Andrea Adnoff, Brian Owen, Jory Murphy and Paul Herbig photo by Frank Atura

“David Ives took Moliere’s basic plot and characters as his starting point," says Leaming. "But, like a skilled jazz musician, he bends the notes. Yes, Ives’s reinvented characters speak in rhyming couplets—but their language is stuffed with contemporary street slang and delivered in the rat-a-tat staccato of screwball comedy.”

Leaming adds that, “Like Moliere’s original, The School for Lies is a brilliant critique of popular culture and hypocrisy. It’s about people behaving badly. Ives loves to walk the line between surrealist style and substance. Beneath the verbal gymnastics, this is a beautiful character study of people caught in a culture that values surface over substance. It was true in 1666, and it is certainly true today! It’s perfect material for our second-year Conservatory students to sink their teeth into.”

Matthew R. Olsen and Matthew Andersen in the FSU/Asolo Conservatory production of The School for Lies photo by Frank Atura

The School for Lies runs October 29-November 17, 2013, at the Cook Theatre in the FSU Center for the Performing Arts, 5555 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Productions are Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m.; Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $29 evenings; $28 matinees. Students receive 50 percent off with advance ticket purchase. Tickets can be purchased in advance at the Asolo Rep’s box office at the FSU Center for Performing Arts; 941-351-8000.

On Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 7:30 p.m., audience members are invited to attend a production of The School for Lies and pay what they can afford for their ticket. These special tickets are available on day of performance only and can be purchased at Asolo Rep box office beginning at 10 a.m. on October 29.