Teatro Live! Opens season with The Cottage, a 1923 farce that gives its women the power
The Professional Canadian Premiere runs Nov. 12 to 29 at the Varscona Theatre, with a $30 preview and pay-what-you-can nights.
The day's top stories, food & events — every morning at 7. Unsubscribe anytime.
Jill Agopsowicz plays Sylvia, an unhappily married Englishwoman who has set off for her annual rendezvous with her lover, Beau. Teatro Live!'s season opener, The Cottage, opens Nov. 13 at the Varscona Theatre.
Sylvia has grown tired of sneaking around and is convinced she can leave her husband and be with the man she actually loves. This being a comedy, plans go sideways almost at once.
The play is a Professional Canadian Premiere of Sandy Rustin's Broadway comedy, which debuted in 2023. Set in the English countryside in 1923, it borrows the fast talk and elegant veneer of a Noel Coward play. Rustin, who also wrote the stage adaptation of Clue, reshaped the form so that the power and the jokes sit with the women.
Farren Timoteo, the company's artistic director, said Rustin wanted to readjust authority toward women while keeping the Coward structure. "Maybe it feels surprising because it's using the Noel Coward structure but readjusts the power and the comedy toward the women," Timoteo said.
"Divorce is taboo, so I think it's people opening up to these more serious topics and allowing themselves to laugh," Agopsowicz said. "Sylvia gets to question her relationships with men, and at that time in the 1920s, that was pretty radical."
The show is rated 13+.
