Century Church Theatre’s season ends with Will You Love Me in the Morning

Written By CONSTANCE SCRAFIELD

Brian Clemens and Dennis Spooner

Real comedy and drama is in community theatres, according to Jo Phoenix. She is directing the upcoming and final production of the season, Will You Still Love Me in the Morning? at Century Church Theatre in Hillsburg, running, weekends from May 24 to June 2.

 “Professional theatres,” she claims, “are doing mainly musical theatre because that's what brings people in. They have to sell tickets and people love musicals.”

Will You still Love Me in the Morning, “is a collaboration between two English writers, one with “long, long credits, Brian Clemens, and Dennis Spooner. Brian Clemens is the man behind the original television series The Avengers.”

 “This play,” she told us, “is about farce. Sometimes, people tend to denigrate farce and people don't want to admit that what they're doing is farce and, yet, in the West End, London [UK], three shows are farce, at the moment.”

The trick to making farce work well is, Ms Phoenix explained. “The characters are deadly serious. We [the audience] really believe in their sincerity. One of the things we really focus on is everyone on stage takes it very seriously – the more they take it seriously on stage, the funnier it is.”

Will You still Love Me in the Morning, “this is farce. It centres around a couple who come back a week early from their honeymoon, which has been a failure: they have not consummated...”

Setting the stage: the newly wed husband, Jeremy, told friends to come and use the house, if they want to, while he and his bride were away. He doesn't know if they came or not and assumes not. They did, though, equally assuming the couple were staying away that week. 

Says Ms Phoenix, “Everyone thinks the house is empty but it is not.”

As Director, she commented, “Rehearsals are going extremely well. This is a very experienced cast who understand farce and are a little bit over the top, which is good in farce. They've really thrown themselves into that. One of the things is the relationships between the characters and they're working really well with that.”

On stage are familiar faces to the Century Church Theatre community. “Harry Bishop new to our theatre and is fitting in really well.”

The company started rehearsing at the end of March.

“It makes a huge difference having an experienced cast. The sooner they can be off book, the sooner we can develop the relationships between the characters. If people are not prepared, you sometimes get to where you want to be on the last night. We always try to be at performance level a week before opening. Once it's that good, then you start developing the rest.” 

Lunch time at rehearsal is a good time: everybody bonds.

 Professional theatres often have an “off Broadway” development production to see what works: “I always tell my cast that rehearsals are not the places to learn lines; rehearsal are to develop the characters.”

There was discussion about the chance of mistakes that have to be covered in any theatre production. “My husband says, “ ‘If you want it to be the same every time, go to the movies. In live theatre, no two performances are ever the same.' That's part of being an ensemble. You have to work together, so, if some little thing goes wrong they can adjust and fix it on stage.”

She commented, “We do attract regular people, who enjoy coming to our productions. And we like to go to as many as we can – it's a good night out for $20. We give a discount for 20 people. We do have lots of people who come in groups.”

Since this is the end of the season, she let us know a bit about what is coming next year. “We're opening in September with Quartet,” she said. “Between the film and the play, the play is much, much better. Basically, it's about four opera singers who are in a home for retired opera singers.”

Meanwhile, audiences should come and see Will You Still Love Me in the Morning, “Because it will cheer everybody up and it will give everybody a good laugh and, also, Century Church theatre is a good place to be. This play is from the 80's. I've directed a lot of comedies, seen lots of comedies but I've never seen a better one than this. We read a lot of plays a year to chose which ones we'll do.”

Jo Phoenix remarked, “I give a play 10 pages – life's too short for bad scripts.”

Will You Still Love Me in the Morning? Opens at Century Church Theatre in Hillsburgh, May 24 and runs until June 2, on the weekends.