Aisling Arts, INC announces world premiere of new adaptation of The Beggar's Opera by award-winning playwright, Bryn Manion.

(Astoria, Queens) The Aisling Arts Ensemble, under the direction of award winning playwright and director, Bryn Manion, will premiere Manion's adaptation of The Beggar's Opera, based loosely on John Gay's 1728 play by the same name, at The Undercroft in Astoria, Queens from March 26-April 12, 2003. Performances Wednesday through Saturday begin at 8pm, with matinees on Saturday at 3pm. There will be no performance April 12 at 8pm. Tickets are $12 general and $10 students/seniors, Thursday through Saturday with a $2 discount being offered for Wednesday evening performances.

The performances of The Beggar's Opera will mark the second anniversary of the Aisling Arts ensemble's residence at the Undercroft. Aisling Arts, INC, a non-profit organization, is dedicated to the promotion of new, experimental works of theater. Working in a collaborative fashion to bring new life to theatrical texts, the company's work features highly stylized, tightly choreographed, wickedly funny and socially relevant theater pieces. In the two years of residency in Astoria, Aisling Arts has carved out a niche as Astoria's premiere experimental theater group drawing comparisons to Simon McBurney's Theatre de Complicite and Anne Bogart's SITI Company.

The Beggar's Opera, as re-envisioned by Aisling Arts, draws up an imaginary city, not at all unlike ours, where shadows prevail and make it difficult to see the stars beyond the fog and despair life inevitably dishes in our direction. Polly Peachum is an odd sort of mathematician. Bound to her position as a counter clerk in her brother's antique shop, she forlornly clicks the days away on one of the many abaci adorning the shop's interior. This all changes one dead winter day when a enigmatic stranger named Macheath sweeps into the shop and offers Polly freedom. She elopes with him and sets the world as she knows it into a precarious state of imbalance. Swept in the current of things darker than she's ever imagined, Polly falls victim to the mercurial hold that villains have over us all: the surrender of our loneliness and a glimpse of a world where everything we want is ours. A deeply sensual combination of the sublime and chaotic, The Beggar's Opera asserts there is never a clear line dividing good from evil and a strange comfort in things that are fated to be.

The Beggar's Opera was written by John Gay in 1728 as a satirical whip crack against the high-brow, highfalutin popular entertainment of the day: the Italian Opera. In it, Gay satirized the politicians and upper classes of his day by mirroring them in the goings-on of the dregs of society as they sing, dance, whore, beg and steal their way through the day. Two hundred years later, Bertoldt Brecht and Kurt Weill used the piece to forward Brecht's socialist agenda and searing political commentary in the enormously popular Threepenny Opera. The text made a further resurgence in the 1970s when Vaclav Havel used the piece to satirize the politicians of the Soviet monolith: due to censorship, he was unable to produce any of his own work and was allowed only to adapt theatrical texts. He, like Brecht chose The Beggar's Opera as a vehicle for discourse about the hypocrisy of the government.

And now a fresh, linguistically rich and relentlessly inquisitive non-musical adaptation for 2003. Manion's adaptation is a full force re-envisioning of the play from a woman's perspective. While still conscious of the broad social issues of poverty and politically charged disenfranchisement, Manion brings the piece to subtler ground where choosing right from wrong is a damning experience and gender compounds the stakes of living in a world where there is only compromise. Macheath becomes Eve enticing Adam with the apple in this subversion of temptation and the sullying of innocence. Some things, the play adroitly insists, are as meant to be as breath itself.

The play runs Wednesday s through Saturday, March 26 through April 12th at 8pm, with 3pm matinees on Saturdays at the Undercroft at the corner of 31st Avenue and 37th Street in Astoria. There will be no evening performance April 12ht. Free lot parking is available adjacent to Trinity Lutheran Church. The show is approximately 95 minutes in length.