T&T ac­tor Paul-Robert Pryce has ap­peared in a Brook­lyn stag­ing of the play She Talks to Beethoven in a dou­ble role. The play, writ­ten by Adri­enne Kennedy and di­rect­ed by Char­lotte Braith­waite, closed last night at JACK, an arts space in Brook­lyn, New York.A press re­lease from Daniela Fi­fi, Pryce's wife, said the ac­tor, who was in last year's Yale Rep pro­duc­tion of Ham­let with Hol­ly­wood ac­tor Paul Gi­a­mat­ti, played the com­pos­er Beethoven and a "dis­ap­peared" man from 1961 Ghana, David Alexan­der. Na­tal­ie Paul played the oth­er role in the play.

"She Talks to Beethoven is a non-seat­ed in­stal­la­tion/per­for­mance that in­te­grates found ob­jects, draw­ing, sil­hou­ette and pro­jec­tion to tell the sto­ry of Suzanne Alexan­der, an African-Amer­i­can woman liv­ing in 1961 post-in­de­pen­dence Ghana. Af­ter the sud­den and mys­te­ri­ous dis­ap­pear­ance of her hus­band, she seeks so­lace in the spir­it of the com­pos­er Lud­wig van Beethoven, whose let­ters she has been study­ing," the re­lease not­ed.

The 1989 script "of­fers a lay­ered dis­course on pol­i­tics, rev­o­lu­tion and loss," the re­lease said. "Set in Ghana, Suzanne waits in her room lis­ten­ing to ra­dio broad­casts about her hus­band who has mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­peared while she at­tempts to write about and com­mu­ni­cate with com­pos­er Lud­wig van Beethoven."Her world is in­fil­trat­ed by snatch­es of Ghana­ian string mu­sic, the rev­o­lu­tion­ary words of Frantz Fanon and strains of Beethoven's Fi­de­lio. Suzanne, re­cov­er­ing from an un­spec­i­fied ill­ness hov­ers in dis­placed time and space fluc­tu­at­ing be­tween Vi­en­na, Aus­tria, in 1803, and Ac­cra, Ghana, in 1961."Braith­waite, the di­rec­tor, helmed Pryce's pro­duc­tion of Smile Or­ange at the Lit­tle Carib in 2001. She is Bar­ba­di­an by de­scent and the re­lease quot­ed her as say­ing about She Talks to Beethoven:

"The mix of lan­guages, French and Eng­lish, presents view­points of post-colo­nial lo­ca­tions re­flect­ed all over the world es­pe­cial­ly the Caribbean. The shared Caribbean her­itage of many of the col­lab­o­ra­tors–in­stal­la­tion de­sign­er Abi­gail Dev­ille (Do­mini­can de­scent), ac­tress Na­tal­ie Paul (Hait­ian de­scent), ac­tor Paul Pryce (Trinidad/Mar­tinique/Ja­maican de­scent), and my own Bar­ba­di­an de­scent–cre­at­ed an en­vi­ron­ment where this shift­ing of lan­guages felt nat­ur­al and un­forced in try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate the com­plex­i­ties of the char­ac­ters col­lec­tive psy­ches."The play­wright, Adri­enne Kennedy, has won sev­er­al awards and ho­n­ours for her work, the re­lease not­ed, in­clud­ing a Guggen­heim fel­low­ship, the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts and Let­ters award, PEN/Lau­ra Pels Award for Mas­ter Amer­i­can Drama­tist, and three Obie Awards (giv­en by the Vil­lage Voice news­pa­per for off-Broad­way and off-off-Broad­way pro­duc­tions).