– a co-production by Mungo Park and Eventministeriet
In Falls City, Nebraska, Brandon is happy. He fled there to escape from charges of grand auto theft and check fraud back home in Lincoln. He begins to hang out with a bunch of juveniles with criminal records and falls in love with Lana, the small town beauty, who’s never met a guy so considerate and sensitive as Brandon. He returns her feelings and they dream of heading for Memphis.
But there’s a problem. Brandon is transgender. He was born a girl. This does not go down well in hick Falls City and it has disastrous consequences.
Boys Don’t Cry is based on the real life story of the murder of Brandon Teena. Brandon’s story was described in articles, documentary films and in 1999 a movie directed by Kimberly Peirce. It inspired extensive lobbying for hate crime laws in the USA.
The stage version is a collaboration by Mungo Park and Eventministeriet, two Danish theatre companies. Mungo Park is based in a Copenhagen suburb, a small repertoire ensemble renowned for its innovative stagings of new works. Eventministeriet is an experimental group, part of the Royal Danish theatre, which puts on productions with very little rehearsal time.
The staging is the result of twelve days of intensive rehearsals and was originally slated to run for just four performances. But it was a smash hit with critics and audiences and went on to win the Special Prize, the most coveted of Danish theatre’s Reumert Awards.
Boys Don’t Cry comes alive partly thanks to a playtext intelligently realized by the director, and partly through the acting style employed in the production, with its exacting demands on the cast.
Boys Don´t Cry was invited to play at Sophiensaele, Berlin, and Kampnagel, Hamburg, during the Nordwind Festival in Germany, December 2015.
About Mungo Park:
Artistic director: Martin Lyngbo since 2006. An agenda-setting entrepreneurial Danish theatrical company with its home in a modest suburb north of Copenhagen: a repertory theatre with a regular company of actors, celebrated for its innovative stagings and new works.
About Eventministeriet:
”The Ministry of Events” resides at the Royal Danish Theatre and mounts productions after just four days of rehearsal employing minimalist technology, using any sets already on stage. Are they staged readings or productions going through a rehearsal phase? Whatever: they are far more heavily improvised and unpolished than any productions you’d normally encounter at Denmark’s national theatre.
