PHILADELPHIA – The Wilma Theater is honored to present the U.S. Premiere of Age of Arousal by award-winning Canadian playwright, Linda Griffiths, and directed by Wilma co-Artistic Director, Blanka Zizka. Age of Arousal explores a boldly uncensored world of loosened corsets as five Victorian women pursue a new age where erotic and economic freedom will reign supreme. Acclaimed at the Enbridge playRites Festival, Canada’s foremost new play festival, Age of Arousal runs at the Wilma from December 5, 2007 through January 6, 2008. Tickets are $37-$52 and are available by calling the Wilma Box Office at (215) 546-7824 or online at www.wilmatheater.org.

Age of Arousal is set in England in the late 19th century when a population imbalance leaves the country flooded with half a million more women than men. The Women’s Suffrage Movement is invigorated by the rise in numbers as non-married ”Odd Women” fight with passion, clarity, and confusion for sexual and financial independence. Determined to make women rich, a formerly militant Suffragette and her devoted protégée battle for equal opportunity and enlist female students to master the technology of the male-dominated workplace.

But when a charismatic man with new ideas is thrust amongst the women, their most passionately held beliefs are thrown into question. Can women remain friends when a man comes between them? Is it possible for two people to love as equals? Sexy, fresh, and vibrantly funny, Age of Arousal is a modern look at forbidden Victorian desires on the brink of explosion.

Playwright Griffiths describes Age of Arousal as “wildly inspired” by The Odd Women, a Victorian novel by George Gissing. Gissing described his title characters as “odd in the sense that they do not make a match as we say ‘an odd glove.’” George Orwell called the novel “one of the best in English,” and it has also been called the most important novel published in Britain in the 1890s.

When Griffiths discovered Gissing’s novel in a used-book store, it prompted her to undertake an investigation of the women’s suffrage movement that she’d long put off. “These are my philosophical ancestors,” Griffiths said. “I always wanted to know more about them but was too lazy to find out more until I read The Odd Women. I knew I wasn’t going to do a conventional adaptation. I’ve taken his basic characters and situation, and leapt off a cliff I was dying to leap off.”

She explains that Age of Arousal is less a “historical play” than a “fantasia,” “a dream of Victorian England. It is stuffed with historical facts and modern/Victorian issues, but the world created is unreal. Everyone in this play is on the brink of tumultuous change. They’re not dry historical figures, but sexual and lubricious, explosive and contradictory.”

Heralded as “one of Canada’s ‘originals’ known not only for the quality of her work, but for the sheer range of her career” by Maclean's Magazine, Griffiths is recognized for her work as both a playwright and an actress. She describes her work as attempting “to dance between the personal, the political and the fantastic. The goal is to create theatre that is highly literate, physically imaginative, and emotionally connected.”

She is the winner of five Dora Mavor Moore Awards, a Gemini award, two Chalmer’s awards, the Quizanne International Festival Award for Jessica, and Los Angeles’ A.G.A. Award for her title performance in the John Sayles’ film Lianna. Her nine plays include Maggie & Pierre – a hit that toured Off-Broadway – Chronic, Alien Creature, and The Duchess: a.k.a Wallis Simpson. Canadian theaters battled over the rights to her newest play Age of Arousal after it brought audiences to their feet at the 2007 Enbridge playRites Festival.

Director Blanka Zizka and the design team have followed the idea of fantasia and dream in their preparation for Age of Arousal. “On nearly every page I saw the characters becoming aroused – intellectually, sensually, sexually, artistically, and politically,” Zizka says. Rather than attempting to reproduce Victorian London onstage, the creative team imagined “a space in which all this stimulation and excitement could live, a space that could burst open, but that would still suggests a sense of claustrophobia and secret desires, in which characters change costume because they’ve changed psychologically, in which the sound echoes Linda’s language and moves between the end of the nineteenth century and the present to create a bridge between the Victorians and us.”

The cast of the Wilma’s production features Eric Martin Brown as Everard Barfoot, Monique Fowler – who was previously seen at the Wilma in Loot – as Alice Madden, Krista Hoeppner as Rhoda Nunn, Mary Martello – a recipient of multiple Barrymore Awards and nominations who has been seen in dozens of Philadelphia theaters over the past ten years – as Mary Barfoot, Larisa Polonsky as Monica Madden, and Roxanne Wellington as Virginia Madden.

The creative team includes set designer Matthew Saunders, costume designer Janus Stefanowicz, lighting designer Russell H. Champa, and composer and sound designer Troy Herion who will compose original music for the production. - by Linda Griffiths