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Bev Newcomb-Madden can relate to the housewife-protagonist of While We Were Bowling. The play (which she’s directing) follows the travails of a traditional family unit in Buffalo, New York, as the cheerfully kitschy ’50s melt into the psychedelic ’60s. “I was a young housewife, too, when this was all going on, so I know the period very well, and I certainly know the frustrations — how we as young mothers acquiesced to a patriarchal society,” she says.
Not, she adds, that the play itself would put it in those terms. “It has serious overtones,” Newcomb-Madden observes, “but it’s a comedy. The family has bowling in common, and that’s kind of a hook for the transition within the framework of the family. The mother’s a TV mother in a bit of an alcoholic haze, and she eventually finds herself, and her children do, too. So it’s metaphor for the times, but it’s also a great time.” As for Newcomb-Madden’s own experience with those times, she jokes, “We just hoped to hell our kids wouldn’t turn out to be druggies.”
While We Were Bowling opens tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Aurora Fox Theatre, 9900 East Colfax Avenue, and continues through May 8; for tickets ($18-$24), showtimes or more information, go to www.aurorafox.org or call 303-739-1970.
Fridays, Saturdays, 7:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Starts: April 8. Continues through May 8, 2011
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