Parlour Song Tickets

Parlour Song

Parlour Song is a play by Jez Butterworth and is produced by the Atlantic Theatre Company. Atlantic’s artistic director Neil Pepe directs and Emily Mortimer, Jonathan Cake and Chris Bauer star in the play about what happens when 2 average people realize they hate who they’ve become. Mortimer, who makes her Off-Broadway debut in the play, recently starred with Ryan Gosling in the movie Lars and the Real Girl, Woody Allen’s Match Point and The Pink Panther opposite Steve Martin. Bauer is an Atlantic ensemble member and appeared on Broadway in the revival of A Streetcar Named Desire and off-Broadway in The Night Heron, Hothouse, Butterworth’s Mojo, Defiance and Refuge; and he can be seen on Alan Ball’s HBO series, True Blood, and on the CBS series, Numb3rs. Cake currently is appearing in Ethan Coen’s Almost an Evening at Atlantic Stage 2; he starred in Baby Doll and Coriolanus, in which he played the title role, at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.

Butterworth starts the play off with a disaster video of factories, towers, bridges, skyscrapers, and other buildings being blown up. Then he introduces Ned (played by Bauer), who is a successful demolitions expert who truly enjoys his work, but has no one he can share it with. His best friend and neighbor, Dale (played by Cake) has seen all Ned’s home movies about a million times; his wife, Joy (played by Mortimer) is so bored with everything to do with Ned, his work and even their marriage. Things have started disappearing around Ned’s house and Ned thinks Joy is stealing from him; after a while, things like his father’s watch and the gold cufflinks Joy gave him aren’t easily found. He gets the prize of his career: the contract to tear down the old shopping center seen as the heart of their community for a long time. Meanwhile, Ned finds that he is a persona non gratis in his own home; especially in the bedroom, into which Joy invites Dale.