Menu
This week The Players will perform a play adaptation of a classic film starring Dustin Hoffman based on the cult Novella by Charles Webb, The Graduate. The Players’ Artistic Director, Steven H. Butler, sets the adaptation in the frame of “A Fall from Innocence,” to accompanyThe Players 8-Track: Sounds of the 70s performance this past June, that inevitably happens to all at some point, societal or personal.
A quintessential 60s hit, The Graduate follows the story of recent college grad Benjamin Braddock and his feelings of disillusionment and aimlessness now that he’s out in the realworld with an entire unknown future ahead of him. An affair with an older woman, Mrs. Robinson, who happens to be his neighbor and a friend of his parents, launches Benjamin into dangerous territory, and his feelings for Mrs. Robinson’s “forbidden” daughter complicates things further.
This timeless story is a deeper one than the comedy it masquerades as lets on. “Though there are wonderfully funny moments in this play, I would not call this a comedy. The heightened drama of several scenes renders that definition inaccurate,” Players’ Director Elliot Rainessays. It explores the emotions that hovering between youth and adulthood conjures in manythrough Ben’s loss of innocence and forced emergence into adulthood.
The Graduate’s theme of adulthood, as it pertains to its time, is expressed through the great divide between Ben’s generation and his parents’ one. At the time, the 60s was rife with revolution and turbulence caused by the Vietnam War and societal injustices. Though Benjamin isn’t a hippie or revolutionary, he finds the expectations set on him by the older generation contemptible and intolerable, unwilling to accept the lack of freedom adult society imposes on him.
Whether you faced your youth in the 60s or today, the sentiment of The Graduate remainstrue; with loss of innocence comes uncertainty and fear of what’s to come. The Players hopes to capture what the film and novella have so artfully done and create our own unique vision of it through our adaptation.
We would like to open it up to you, the audience, now. After you watch The Players rendition of The Graduate through our lens, we encourage you to let us know your take and thoughts on this classic hit.
The show runs this Thursday through Saturday, August 17-26, at 7:30 pm, and Sunday, August 27, at 2 pm. We hope you’ll join us!
For more information and to purchase tickets to The Graduate this week visit