The Burning Coal Theatre Presents HUFFLEPUFFED, 8/16 - 8/26

Burning Coal Theatre Company presents Mon Frere of Greensboro, NC in Hufflepuffed, a play about a certain young warlock with really cool glasses, August 16 – 26, 2012 at the Murphey School auditorium, 224 Polk Street in Raleigh. Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 pm (Note special time) and Sundays at 2 pm. All tickets: $10. Please call 919-834-4001 for tickets, or visit us online at www.burningcoal.org.

When we went to write our "Potter" show, we proceeded with business as usual, conjuring individual sketches inspired by what-if scenarios and the absurd peccadilloes of everyday existence. However, as we wrote sketch after sketch featuring "random student number one" or " generic child number two," a creative complication emerged. The most enchanting part of any great fantasy author's setting is how immersive it is. The reader feels like the world has been fleshed out-to the point that they could walk anywhere or meet anyone at Harry's school, even to the parts undescribed, and find them as deep and vibrant as anything set down in the published text. Every character--no matter how small--has a name, a history, hopes and opinions. Every stone has a story. If we were to properly explore this work, we had to get to the real magic that makes it work-only then could we truly mess it up. We took our bit-part players and brought them to the forefront: our two ever-present nameless students received names, motivations, and relationships that were all their own. And since they were in every sketch, this fleshing-out knitted our naturally frenetic sketch show together in surprising ways. Bound with character flesh, a narrative crept up from the basement of the backwoods cabin of our minds. We called it Hufflepuffed because the Necronomicon was already taken. The books' classic characters were still there, but now they had competition for the spotlight. A few of them grew very angry about this. What we had started to craft was a meta-aware theatrical rumination akin to Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a visceral bildungsroman in the vein of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. What we got when we finished was another Potter fan-fic with a bunch of dirty jokes.

The story of Mon Frere Comedy Troupe is the story of a man, another man, and four more men. We started cooking it up on the mean streets of Greensboro, North Carolina at the Idiot Box Comedy Club two years ago with our spicy brand of sketch comedy and cutting edge slide-show-on-a-wrinkled-bed-sheet technology . Back then, the Idiot Box was mainly improv comedy and stand-up, but now, a few people have seen the posters we tape to the window. They're good posters. We perform at the Idiot Box every third Friday of the month, and at Roux! in Charlotte every fourth Friday with an ever-increasing smorgasbord of original and hilarious material. Abroad, we've performed at the Geek-Week festival in Boston, and the North Carolina Comedy Arts festival in Chapel Hill.

Mon Frere includes John McIntosh, AJ Schraeder, Al-don Schraeder, Bob Bashere, Mathew Schantz, Tom McCoy and stage manager/techie Anne Meyers.

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