The Arsonists

What is the great evil we are failing to face up to today? Award-winning Bay Area auteur Mark Jackson (Salomania, Metamorphosis, Salome, Miss Julie) returns to Aurora Theatre Company to direct British playwright Alistair Beaton’s elegant new translation of The Arsonists, Max Frisch’s classic comic parable about appeasement (sometimes known as Beidermann and the Firebugs or Fire Raisers), featuring Dan Hiatt, Tim Kniffin, and Michael Ray Wisely, along with Kevin Clarke, Tristan Cunningham, Gwen Loeb,… Show more Dina Percia, and Michael Uy Kelly.

Fires are becoming something of a problem, popping up all over town. But Mr. Biedermann has it all under control. In his business life and in the domestic arena, he tries to live a life of blameless middle-class decency. He’s a respected member of the community with a loving wife and a booming business, so surely nothing can get to him. It is this sense of bourgeois propriety that renders Biedermann defenseless when two arsonists turn up at his house. Far from kicking them out, he helps them light the fuse in the hopes that appeasement will prevent catastrophe. Inspired by the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, this absurdist allegory satirizes the way that people can be manipulated into accommodating the very thing that will destroy them.

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