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Double Bill: Still Desire You & Fire
by Paul Ledoux and David Young
Two plays that were generated
out of the playwrights’ interest in the interpenetrating relationships
between carnal desire, spiritual love, media and popular music.
Still Desire
You (a fresh adaptation of I
Love You, Anne Murray, first produced in the 1980s) deals with issues
that are central to the growing malaise of celebrity culture in our
society. For some fans, innocent fantasies about their connection to
the performer behind the song can become real and dangerous obsessions.
Such is the story of David
Stuart, a fundamentally decent man on trial for “the crime of loving
a girl” who happens to be a pop icon. Still
Desire You explores the slippery slope of a fan’s delusions and,
in the process, indicts the star-making machinery behind our communal
obsession with celebrity.
Fire explores the extraordinary
relationship between Pentecostal Christianity, the birth of rock and
roll and the rise of right-wing fundamentalism as a force in American
politics. Inspired by the lives of Jerry Lee Lewis and Reverend Jimmy
Swaggart, who learned how to play on the same piano, Fire traces
the rise and fall of Cale and Herschel, the sons of a Southern preacher.
In the ’50s Cale becomes a rock and roll star but, convinced he is
damned for playing “the devil’s music,” embarks on a self-destructive
rampage that nearly destroys him. By the 1980s Herschel has become a
famous televangelist and is being drawn into a dangerous mix of faith
and right-wing politics. Caught between the two brothers is the woman
who loves them both, Herschel’s wife, Molly. It’s a play about searching
for salvation with your head, your heart and your groin.
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