April 20 - May 16

Lucille Lortel Theatre
121 Christopher Street

Engaged was originally scheduled to be directed by Gerald Gutierrez, who died suddenly and unexpectedly in late December.  Engaged will be performed in his memory.

"The most surprising thing about ENGAGED is its modernity" - Time Out

THE PLAY

Matrimonial vows are batted about like balloons by three young couples in this sharp satire about matrimony and money in Victorian Society. First produced in 1877, the play begins in Scotland with young damsels, a wrecked train, con artists and a daisy chain of marriage proposals. It ends with a confrontation in London, where all clamor to find out who is engaged to whom, and who has money and who does not.

Although mainly known for his operetta collaborations with Sir Arthur Sullivan, W.S. Gilbert was a brilliant comic writer in his own right. ENGAGED, one of the great comedies of the English repertory, was also groundbreaking and directly influenced Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Gilbert's satire is trenchant and is in a line with Jonson, Congreve, Coward and Orton.

"Stories of love gone wrong, mistaken identity and broken promises were the stuff of all nineteenth-century melodramas. What W.S. Gilbert achieved in ENGAGED, first seen in 1877, was to help establish a new kind of comic acting in which the players remained serious. What is delightful in the complicated plot, with the insistence on the mercenary side of love and friendship, is that many of the lines have a contemporary ring, and the situations seem to foreshadow the theatre of the absurd... Gilbert's description of marriage outdoes him: 'It seems greedy to take up half a century of another's person attention - besides, one might come across somebody else one liked better.'"- Patrick O'Conner, Times Literary Supplement

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