Luis Aguilar as Paul and Rhiannon Creighton as Corie. Photo by Carla Gibson.
Moonstone Theatre Company, the two-year-old company headed by Sharon Hunter, will launch its new season this week with Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, which follows newlyweds Corie and Paul Bratter as they learn to live together in a top-floor New York brownstone.
It’s the first of three productions this season, all themed around the idea of people trying to understand one another. Hunter says the theme was inspired by her own life and a season of loss, both through friends moving and passing away.
“What I have found is that it is so important to say the things that you need to say to people when they are there in front of you, because life is extremely short,” says Hunter. “If we can express how we feel and really try to take away the anger and pain and hurt, try to really understand what the other person is saying, we can hopefully hold onto relationships. Life is so fleeting. There isn’t enough time.”
Barefoot in the Park, she says, explores this theme through the relationship between Paul and Corie, who is in danger of losing her partner as their personalities clash. The characters experience a similar malaise in Grand Horizons, but after 50 years of marriage. And in Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside, a student and teacher at Yale are unable to say everything they want to each other as they navigate a complicated relationship.
“All three shows this year really are touching on that subject of the human spirit and empathy and how we understand one another in a relationship,” says Hunter. “It doesn't necessarily have to be a romantic relationship. It could be a relationship between two people that work together or how people interact when something very difficult comes into their lives.”
Working with the cast and crew as they explore this theme and the deeper moments between the one-liners has been essential to the production of Barefoot in the Park, says Hunter. The team hopes that audiences will reflect on their own lives and relationships over the course of the show, finding places where they can laugh more alongside those where they could perhaps be more straightforward and vulnerable. While the Neil Simon-penned romantic comedy is, of course, meant to be funny, it's the heart of the show that appealed to Hunter as she was curating the 2022-2023 season.
“It's nice to sort of delve into a comedy that everybody thinks is a laugh riot. There's a lot more to it than that. And in all of these shows, there's so much more to it,” she says. “That's what I love about theater in general, is that there's always layers to explore. And that makes it so much more exciting.”
Barefoot in the Park runs October 27 through November 13 at Kirkwood Performing Arts Center. For tickets and a full 2022-2023 season schedule, visit moonstonetheatrecompany.com.
