Our Mission
The Mission of West End Players Guild is to offer character-driven, dramatically significant plays that appeal to and reflect the diverse tastes of the St. Louis metropolitan theater-going public. We are big theater in a small space.
Fox Performing Arts Charitable Foundation Challenge Grant to West End Players Guild
This year West End Players Guild presents its 100th season of “big theatre in a small space” and today the Fox Performing Arts Charitable Foundation announced that it has joined in the celebration with a $1,000 challenge grant to WEPG. The grant is conditioned on WEPG raising another $1,000 from new donors during the coming months.
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West End Players Guild Announces Its 100th Season of Theatre
Picasso, Pinter and a St. Louis premiere are among the highlights of the West End Players Guild’s upcoming 100th season of theater. The 2010–2011 season begins in September with Jeffrey Hatcher’s A Picasso followed in November by A Woman’s Place, an evening of four one-acts by authors including David Mamet and Harold Pinter. In February, West End Players presents Shelagh Stevenson’s The Memory of Water and wraps the season in April with the St. Louis premiere of Kathryn Chetkovich’s Acts of Love.
WEPG’s earliest ancestor, the St. Louis Artists’ Guild, offered its first evening of theatre in November, 1911. The Guild performed at the auditorium in the Artists’ Guild Building at Union and Enright. The Guild performed in several more locations and went through a series of spinoffs and mergers before emerging as the West End Players Guild and settling in its current home, the Union Avenue Christian Church, in 1985. The Guild’s home today is across the street from the site of its original venue of 99 years ago.
The plays are more contemporary, of course, and in 2010–2011 the Guild again offers the best of “big theatre in a small space.”
A Picasso takes its audience back to Paris, 1941. Pablo Picasso has been summoned by German occupation forces to a storage vault for an interrogation. But when it is revealed that his paintings are to be burned by the Nazis as “degenerate art,” Picasso becomes desperate to save his work. It is a cat-and-mouse drama about art, politics, sex and truth, with a twist. Steve Callahan directs the show, which will be presented September 24–October 3.
November 5th through the 14th are the dates for A Woman’s Place, four one-act plays presenting women in extraordinary circumstances. The plays are Trifles by Susan Glaspell, Australia by David Mamet, Hello Out There by William Saroyan, and the hauntingly beautiful Ashes to Ashes by Harold Pinter. Renee Sevier-Monsey and Carrie Phinney will direct.
The Memory of Water by Shelagh Stevenson is gloriously funny and deeply felt. It appears at first to be pure black comedy, with newly bereaved sisters indulging wildly in witty bickering and dress-ups. Their quarrels over the funeral arrangements, their well-worn family roles, their unsatisfactory men and their mixed memories of a highly feminine working-class mother are hilarious. The Memory of Water skillfully charts the joyous and painful territory of family relationships with insight and compassion. Tom Kopp makes his WEPG directorial debut with this show, which runs February 4–13.
The season ends on a mysterious note with the St. Louis premiere of Acts of Love, directed by Robert Ashton. Ed, a physician, and Sheila, a well-known anthropologist, are celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary at their summer cottage. Their son, Tom, joins them, bringing with him his new girlfriend, Annie, who is thrilled to discover that her boyfriend's mother is one of her academic heroines. As the weekend unfolds, it becomes unclear whether Annie's presence at the house is a matter of fate, coincidence or deliberate manipulation. The tension between the women leads to other deeper questions about the intertwined acts of love and deceit that have brought them together. This final production of the 100th WEPG season runs April 1–10.