Tagged: Arts

Playwright Mallery Avidon had an unconventional upbringing. As a kid and young teen she lived, on and off, in an ashram -- the same ashram that later cropped up as a setting in Elizabeth Gilbert's nonfiction book "Eat Pray Love," later made into a movie starring Julia Roberts. Avidon mines those experiences in her engaging autobiographical play, "O Guru Guru Guru or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you," an attempt to reconcile several complicated, competing emotions about contentment, identity and spirituality.

Playwright Mallery Avidon mines her unconventional childhood for her new play, “O Guru Guru Guru, or why I don't want to go to yoga class with you.”

"Part of that unconventional upbringing has to do with the ashram that Elizabeth Gilbert goes to in the book 'Eat Pray Love,' that Julia Roberts goes to in the movie 'Eat Pray Love.' The play is an investigation of the way that unconventional spirituality affected my life," says Avidon.

This week on The Big Break, the Louisville Ballet rehearses for its upcoming mixed repertory program, Breaking Ground while trainee Claire Horrocks gets called up to the stage for a surprise bonus role. Over at Actors Theatre of Louisville, acting apprentice Samantha Beach finishes up rehearsals for "Sleep Rock Thy Brain," the apprentice anthology play that opens this weekend, and she reflects on the new play rehearsal process. 

As the curtain rises on Branden Jacobs-Jenkins' "Appropriate," a rattling chorus of 13-year cicadas fills the Pamela Brown Auditorium. Far from a gentle nocturne, the sound swells with the pregnant heat of a southern summer night, conjuring images of rattling bones. Low lights reveal a man and a younger woman slipping through an open window into the living room of a plantation house that had, to be kind, seen better days.