Opening night for the three new plays in the Expats.cz and Prague.tv Playwriting Contest approaches quickly, and we would to share some news about these works we’ve gleaned from our visits to rehearsals.
A Hole in the Wall
New plays often change in rehearsals – even their names aren’t written in stone.
That’s what’s happened in the case of A Hole in the Wall, which was originally titled Hostage Situation. The new title offers a bit more mystery and ambiguity.
A Hole in the Wall’s director Nick Perry cast the play’s author – Cohen Ambrose – and Jeff Beck in the play’s lead roles. The play follows Timmy, a young and promising hitman, as he is given his instructions for his first job. His clever plan to make the hit in a cheap hotel room in the suburbs is derailed when a delay in his arrival finds the intended target of the hit to be already dead of a heart attack.
In a panic, Timmy calls on Tommy – a more experienced assassin – to help him. But Tommy’s instructions are to make the failed hit into a statement – and a messy one at that. By the time the police arrive, the two assassins are holding one dead man hostage with only a single empty nine-millimeter pistol between them.
Nick Perry has concentrated on film for much of his career. (He started out as an assistant to Francis Ford Coppola on the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula.) He has found some solid connections between A Hole in the Wall and his favored art form.
„The play is very cinematic actually,“ Perry says, „so there is some common ground. My hope is to combine stylized theatrical elements with a looser, improvisational film-style performance, so the audience feels like voyeurs in this comedy of errors.“
