Q&A with QE2

In which any Questions you Might Have are Answered by Friendly Ducks

 

Who Are You?

We are the QE2 Players Stage Company, a 501C3 not-for-profit theatre company.  We were founded in Boston six years ago, and are dedicated to producing plays with meaningful roles for older women, or “Old Ducks” as they often prefer to be called.

 

And What Do You Do Exactly?

We stage plays that reveal older women as complex, dynamic people; people who make important choices, who affect others, who give and take and act – Old Ducks who swim well within the main current of life. 

 

Because our principal actors are British and Australian expatriates, we also have developed a reputation for bringing the best new drama from the British Isles (and parts beyond) to Boston audiences.

 

Much of our work has been staged at the Boston Center for the Arts, on Tremont Street in the heart of the South End.  Most recently, we presented the local premiere of Sunil Kuruvilla’s Fighting Words, a semi-fictional play about the Welsh love of boxing, a tragic death in the ring, and the abanoned women of the small mining town of Merthyr Tydfyl who must cope with both. 

 

Other area premieres have included Talking Heads, the first complete local staging of Alan Bennett’s six monologues written for the BBC in the late 1980s; Irish playwright Geraldine Aron’s The Donahue Sisters; Ayshe Raif’s portrait of London, Cafe Society; Scottish author Evelyn Hood’s comedy Genteel; an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s masterpiece Roman Fever; and Waltzing Australia, an original work about the peculiarities of life Down Under.  Additionally, for each of the past five years we have contributed a production of a new work by a Boston-area playwright to the Boston Theatre Marathon.

 

In the daylight hours, we do educational performances for children – over 100 per year, in fact – bringing strong and sensible older female characters (like the Puritain-era poet Anne Bradstreet) into schools and classrooms all over New England.

 

Why Is That Important?

Perhaps you’ve noticed that women over the age of fifty seldom make it onto the stage, and when they do, well... they are rarely aloud to set it (metaphorically) on fire.  Instead, they tend to conform to static and recognizable stock types.  The QE2 Players believe that older women amount to a great deal more than these tired stereotypes.   In fact, we know that they do:  We are Them.

 

And the Press... Do They Agree?

Well, not always – the toads.

 

However, here are some tasty morsels on which we’ve been dining out recently:

“Bennett sure knows how to write...and QE2 knows how to get results.  Believe it or not, these vignettes work much better on stage (than on television.)   Rosemary Ryding's rendition of Bed Among The Lentils far outshines the telly version (with Maggie Smith.)  QE2 gives us talking, breathing human beings...  In Her Big Chance,  Jo Barrick gives a tour-de-force performance as a manic in the throes of denial...  Ann Leacock breaks our hearts as a seventy-five year old widow who lives in fear of being consigned to a nursing home.  A Cream Cracker Under The Settee has one of the most poignant descriptions of any play about aging of what it's like to ‘go daft in a nursing home wearing someone else's dress.’  Leacock’s moment of decision, when she turns down the chance for help, is nothing short of breathtaking.”

—Beverley Creasey, TheaterMirror.com – Review of “Talking Heads I”

“This was my first encounter with the QE2 Players who produce British, Irish and Australian plays about older women and I look forward to future evenings with them --- had I an onion handy, I would drip tears onto these scribbles for luck just as Mrs. Davies does with her cake batter.”

-  Carl A. Rossi, Theatermirror.com – Review of “Fighting Words”

“Under the generous direction of Nora Hussey, the actresses bring loving detail to these limited lives. Accent, gesture, costume, and facial expression assure that we in the audience know these women much better than they know themselves... (T)he actresses believed, and performed the improbable with thrilling panache.”

- G.L. Horton, StagePage – Review of “A Toast To The Ladies”

“Jennifer Jones is so deliciously good as Mrs. Davies,  she can fashion Shakespeare out of a list of cake ingredients and make an aria out of a shrug.   Julie Pummer gives a tour de force performance as the tomboy who’d rather her fists speak for her , as does Jennifer Burke as the married sister who would throw over her husband in a heartbeat... “

- Beverly Creasy, New England Entertainment Digest – Review of “Fighting Words”