Now running at the Center Stage Theater is the DramaDogs production of E.M. Lewis’ Dance Me to the End of Love — eight short plays offering a stroboscopic view of relationships.
The play is directed by Ken Gilbert and E. Bonnie Lewis, with lighting and set design by Theodore Michael Dolas, and starring E. Bonnie Lewis, Ken Gilbert, Kathy Marden, Jennifer Marco, George Coe and Mack Urbanowicz.
Dance Me to the End of Love takes its title from a song of the same name by Leonard Cohen:
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
It seems not inappropriate to regard Leonard as the unheard narrator of these scenes, to hear his rumbling baritone as the only connective tissue. If there was ever a show that defined the distinction between narrative and drama, this is it. These are not stories, these are Newtonian collisions in a cloud chamber. We don’t see what led up to these moments; we don’t see what happens next.
In “What any lover learns,” Archibald MacLeish says: “What runs, Swirling and leaping into sun, is stone’s Refusal of the river, not the river.”
And it is the refusal that E.M. Lewis shows us, the decisive clash and leap, with all of world history behind the characters, pushing. Intense and memorable.
Dance Me to the End of Love plays at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday in Center Stage Theater in Paseo Nuevo. Tickets are $23 for general admission, and $18 for seniors and students with valid student ID. A “pay what you can performance” will be Thursday, for which tickets are available at the box office only — no online sales or credit card sales — for an $8 suggested minimum donation. Due to the particularities of the Center Stage space, late seating is on a limited basis, or is not allowed at all once the performance begins.
For all performances but “pay what you can,” tickets are available at the box office by calling 805.963.0408 or online by clicking here.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.