PlayMakers Repertory Company is bringing back open captioning at selected performances during its 2012-2013 season.
Open captioning enhances play-going enjoyment by allowing the audience to read along with the play. A screen is visible to the audience, which displays the text of the play as the actors are speaking it. A professional open captioning operator is in the audience, watching the show and scrolling through the text, keeping up with the action on stage.
PlayMakers offered open captioning in a pilot program during its spring productions of “The Making of a King: Henry IV & V” and “Noises Off.” The service proved such a popular feature that the theater will offer open captioning during Saturday matinees for each of PlayMakers’ main stage shows and during the theater’s PRC2 second stage opener, “An Iliad.”
Open captioning will be available at the 7:30 p.m. Sept. 7 PRC2 performance of “An Iliad.” It will also be available for Saturday 2 p.m. main stage performances on Sept. 29 (“Red”), Nov. 3 (“Imaginary Invalid”), Dec. 8 (“It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play”), Feb. 9 (“A Raisin in the Sun”), Feb. 16 (“Clybourne Park”) and April 13 (“Cabaret”).
Hannah Grannemann, managing director of PlayMakers, describes open captioning as being “like closed captioning on your TV — but in the theater.”
For information and to place an order to attend open captioned performances, visit the PlayMakers’ box office in the Center for Dramatic Art on Country Club Road or call (919) 962-PLAY (7529). Tickets to Saturday matinee performances are $35 each, or season tickets for the theater’s entire Saturday Matinee/Open Captioning Series may be purchased for $179. To learn more, visit http://playmakersrep.org/outreach/allaccess/opencaption.
Theatre Development Fund is partnering with PlayMakers to provide open captioning at no additional cost to patrons during the 2012-2013 season. Funding for PlayMakers’ open captioning pilot program was provided by The Strowd Roses Foundation, a Chapel Hill based foundation.
PlayMakers is the professional theater in residence in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
