Second up in the season will be Sue Townsend’s The Great Celestial Cow, a play she developed with London’s famed Joint Stock Theatre Company.
Like Caryl Churchill, who also collaborated with Joint Stock on many of her early works, Sue has endowed the piece with an abundance of theatricality, from the surreal to the broadly comedic, and a large cast of wonderful characters (including, of course, Princess, the cow of the title). The play explores what happens when the second wave of a family follows the husband and other members from their village in India to an industrial city in the English Midlands. The inevitable differences in the rates at which different generations assimilate are cross-referenced with the way the women of the family begin to respond to the greater freedom and assertiveness afforded by their new cultural surroundings. The play becomes a testament both to the adaptability of the immigrant in an alien and inimical environment, and to women, whose combined strength substantially undermines the power of an oppressive patriarchy. This will be a U.S. premiere.