Third Annual Double Take Fringe Festival October 18 and 19!
Tickets NOW ONSALE AT: Double-Take.org
tickets
SO EXCITING!! 8 snappy shows in 8 different venues all within walking distance in downtown Greenfield, MA.
A LETTER FROM SABINE by John Bechtold. Using a combination of installation art and live performance, children (ages 7-10) will be invited to become Postmasters-in-Training as they embark on an adventure to deliver a letter from a mysterious woman named Sabine Strohem to Griffin Moss at his art studio and shop, Gryphon Cards, located in downtown Greenfield. An immersive theater experience designed from non-adults, audiences will be escorted to the store in small numbers for an intimate and magical encounter, complete with a surprise visit to Sabines studio – located on an island on the other side of the world. Based on the epistolary story Griffin and Sabine by Nick Bantock; developed and performed by the Amherst Regional High School Theater Company.
MONKAMOK THEATER COMPANYS Moon Up By Morning. In this future-present the consensus reality is bleak and oppressive. Three everyday characters who are blissfully enslaved to the societal dreariness, discover their part in the collective dreaming, and venture to awaken the source of all dreams. This is a mythic odyssey through a lunar landscape of inner realms from abstraction and disconnection to empowerment. Utilizing physical theater, giant masks and innovative stage craft to convey the depth and humor intrinsic to our human condition, Monkamok presents a heros journey of our present-day dystopia.
33/13 – Social Justice in Two Short Plays
GAN-e-meed Theatre Project presents 33/13 – Social Justice in Two-Short Plays NO MORE HOG JOWLS AT THE JIM CROW COUNTER, by Candace Perry, directed by Amy S. West. Used to be black folks were required to sit at the Jim Crow counter in the back room of the 4 Way Lunch, a diner in Cartersville, Georgia. Two friends are long-time customers who have made the back room theirs, though the law now says they can sit up front. Its been their choice. What Happens when that choice is changed? DIE KLEINEN, PARTS 1 & 2, by Molly Haas-Hooven, directed by Dori Robinson. It is the summer of 1933 in a small town in Bavaria. Six youth grapple with first love and new found sexuality. But violence from the outside seeps into their insular world and as they discover who they are, they must confront for the first time the violence within themselves. Some run away from it. Others embrace it. A few are forced to do the unthinkable. 6:15 & 7:30 both nights
THE MARRIAGE PROPOSAL by Anton Chekhov is considered the best of his many one-act plays, and has delighted audiences for more than 125 years. The setting is the country house of a landowner Stepan Stepanovitch Chubukov who lives with his daughter Natalya Stepanovna. They are visited by Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov, a neighboring landowner who intends to ask for the hand of Chubukovs daughter. In true farcical form chaos and many hilarious situations ensue within minutes. The play is a sure fire crowd pleaser. With John Reese, Joan Haley and Michael Haley.
THE RED GUITAR by John Sheldon. The Fender Stratocaster guitar was first advertised in the spring of 1954. At the same time, the first Hydrogen bombs were made operational. These two inventions were going to change the world. At the time, I was 3 years old. The electric guitar was to become a dominant force in my life, giving me entry into creative realms, while the H bomb would represent the opposite, a force of total destruction. My life played out between these two opposing energies.
AS WE GO ALONG with Jack Golden and Karen Montanaro is part verbal dexterity, part physical eloquence and all high risk. These two veteran performers cast aside the security of a script and rely only on their imagination, personal history and stream of inspiration, to guide them into a realm of infinite possibilities. Following their three rules for improvisation: Listening to what the present moment is suggesting, Reading what is coming at them from all directions and Following their impulses faithfully, Jack and Karen venture into a world where the opportunities are endless. Come join them on this inventive expedition into the unknown.
HIGH TIDE by playwright Brad Slaight directed by Stephen Eldredge. Set on a California beach, this poignant comedy-drama features teenage surfers Brian and Keith, who have just come from the funeral of their close friend, the brilliant, enigmatic surfer Kirk. Each wonders in his own way if he ever really knew Kirk. They struggle to share their feelings, but they are, in fact, teenage boys. A surprise encounter with tourists Connie and Lisa disrupts and engages them, ultimately helping them face their grief and revealing the hidden truth about Kirk’s final hours…
FOR WHOM THE SOUTHERN BELLE TOLLS by Christopher Durang directed by Ezekiel Baskin. In this parody of THE GLASS MENAGERIE, the fading Southern belle, Amanda, tries to prepare her hyper-sensitive, hypochondriacal son, Lawrence, for “the feminine caller.” Terrified of people, Lawrence plays with his collection of glass cocktail stirrers. Ginny, the feminine caller, is hard of hearing and overbearingly friendly. Brother Tom wants to go to the movies, where he keeps meeting sailors who need to be put up in his room. Amanda tries to face everything with “charm and vivacity,” but sometimes she just wants to hit somebody! “…With the help of Mr. Durang, the fine art of parody has returned to theater in a production you can sink teeth and mind into, while also laughing like an idiot…” NY Times.
Snapshots of her youth: Performance offers colorful look at artist’s early life in ‘MY BRONX’
By STEVE PFARRER Staff Writer Wednesday, July 10, 2013For many years, Terry Jenoure worked primarily as a musician; she’s a talented jazz violinist and singer who has played with the likes of Archie Shepp and John Carter. Then came a phase as a college professor, during which she taught other teachers about ways to incorporate art and creativity in their curricula. She also wrote poetry, created dolls from fabric and other materials, and curated art exhibits.
Now Jenoure, the longtime artistic director of the Augusta Savage Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has found a way to meld many of her artistic impulses and experience in a multidisciplinary theatrical show.
“MY BRONX,” which opens Friday at the ArtsBlock in Greenfield and runs through Sunday, is an unconventional theater piece that’s been designed around Jenoure’s poetry and music, offering a colorful look at her childhood and teenage memories of growing up in the Bronx in New York City. She and Linda McInerney, the director of Old Deerfield Productions, have worked that material into a narrative that’s told through words, music and dance.
Jenoure is joined on stage by a longtime friend and collaborator, New York dancer and movement therapist Maria Mitchell, and Amherst drummer and percussionist Bob Weiner, both of whom have created their own artistic responses to Jenoure’s material, based on basic direction from her but also on their own interpretations of her words and music.
“I’ve always been interested in different ideas and means of expression, and my identity is as an improviser,” said Jenoure, who lives in Greenfield. “And I like to work with people who think the same way. … I wanted see what Lisa and Bob would come up with that could surprise us.”
McInerney, whose company last year produced “Truth,” an opera based on the life of abolitionist Sojourner Truth, says she’s been a fan of Jenoure’s varied artistry for years and has long wanted to work with her. The trouble was that Jenoure was usually busy performing in Europe, or teaching at a former position at Lesley College in Boston, or overseeing the Augusta Savage Gallery.
“I said, ‘Let’s do something here,’ ” McInerney said, recalling one of her past conversations with Jenoure. “ ‘The world knows you, but not your hometown.’ ”
McInerney, who began collaborating with Jenoure last fall on the material for “MY BRONX,” says the piece “has so many levels. It’s colorful and personal, it has music and dance and spoken word, it has these remarkable dolls Terry makes that become part of the performance. … It’s where [Jenoure’s] creative being really comes together.”
Jenoure, who earned a master’s degree and doctorate in education at UMass, said the opportunity to work with McInerney developed in the last couple of years, after she left her longtime teaching position at Lesley College to spend more time in the Valley and to concentrate on her varied artwork.
“It was kind of a scary thing, financially and otherwise, a big decision,” she said. “But I wanted more time to write, to compose music, to think about these ideas I had and try to focus on what was important to me. … I started writing a lot of new poetry, and I kept asking myself, ‘What is the story I’m trying to tell?’ ”
As it turned out, much of this work was tied to memories Jenoure had of growing up in the Bronx, going to school, and of members of her family, whose roots are from Puerto Rico and Jamaica. She turned over about 30 poems to McInerney, and the two began thinking of ways to use it in building a continuous narrative.
Jenoure notes that “MY BRONX” is not a step-by-step biography, but a series of sketches and snapshots of her youth. “The stories I’m telling are not literal ones, and the way we tell them varies.”
McInerney says that in her role as a “curator” of Jenoure’s poems, she looked for different means of expanding the storytelling experience by adding Jenoure’s violin and various kinds of movement, as well as bringing in other performers. “We started talking about ways we could move in Maria [Mitchell], about what other sounds we could bring in,” she said.
For Jenoure, making Mitchell a part of the production was an easy choice: The two have collaborated many times before, including in some performances in which Jenoure has recited her poetry and played her violin while Mitchell danced. “The difference this time is I’ve never tied all these things together in a theatrical piece,” Jenoure said.
Finally, Jenoure enlisted Weiner, the Amherst drummer, knowing he was familiar with the Caribbean music she’d heard when she was growing up. She calls him both a skilled accompanist and “a sensitive human being” who’s brought a wealth of sounds to the production.
“MY BRONX,” which runs a little over an hour, has an important visual component as well: an art installation built around the handmade, mixed-media dolls Jenoure has crafted over the years, including some life-sized ones she dances with during the performance. Some of those dolls, which Jenoure has previously displayed in exhibitions, will be available for sale after the shows, as will her poetry.
McInerney says “MY BRONX” will travel to Florida and Cuba next March for performances, and both she and Jenoure hope they can take the show to other parts of the country, or to Europe at some point. Both see the production as a key blend of what McInerney calls “structure and improvisation,” as well as an invitation to audience members to think of creative ways of telling their own stories.
Jenoure says she’s not sure what her next artistic venture will be. But after focusing on one medium as opposed to another over the years, working on “MY BRONX” has inspired her to think of other ways of blending her art: “At the moment, I’m very happy to bring all these things together in sort of a delicious mix.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
“MY BRONX” takes place Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at ARTSBLOCK, 289 Main St., in Greenfield. Tickets cost $15 and are available in advance at www.olddeerfieldproductions.org and at the door.
MY BRONX TIX NOW ONSALE - plus therapeutic dance workshop
TICKETS ON SALE NOW:
MY BRONX TIX
Old Deerfield Productions presents a new interdisciplinary theater piece called MY BRONX by Terry Jenoure on July 12, 13 and 14 at 7:30 pm at the ARTSBLOCK on 289 Main Street in Greenfield, MA. Tickets are $15 and are available at www.olddeerfieldproductions.org and at the door on the nights of the show.
The piece features original music and poetry by Ms. Jenoure. Maria Mitchell, renowned New York dancer, and acclaimed drummer Bob Weiner will both accompany her in this dynamic piece. McInerney says, “This piece is brave, expansive, intense, musical, playful, vibrant, and brimming with color and texture. The stories are woven together like a tapestry moving from past to present, while bringing the audience on a ride through her memory. It is an amazing amalgam of forms all emanating from Terry. She celebrates her Jamaican and Puerto Rican roots, her Jazz mastery, and her poetry, all while dancing with her hand-sewn dolls on the imagined streets of her transplanted home: the Bronx. You have never experienced anything like this show. MY BRONX will leave a song beating in your heart and a desperate need to grab a pencil to write your own story.”
In performance, MY BRONX offers an alchemical interplay between structure and improvisation. Using her own flexible format to communicate her ideas to the other performers, Ms. Jenoure says, “I’ve made maps for the drummer and dancer that are independent of cues from the poems. It challenges the traditional roles of soloist and accompanist. Each artist works in her/his own world, but together, the effect gives birth to surprises.” In MY BRONX, Jenoure’s love for stories gives voice to the ways transplanted cultural and familial threads reweave in a new place. And most exciting, her compelling tale waves us on to tell our own!
The performance will be enhanced by an expansive art installation consisting of handmade mixed-media dolls, some life sized, some tiny, that Ms. Jenoure has crafted and that are incorporated into the choreography and set. The dolls will be available for sale, as will a book of her poetry.
McInerney commissioned MY BRONX through her production company Old Deerfield Productions, “I’ve wanted to create with Terry for many years. She has been performing all around the world while living in Greenfield so she is well known in Europe but not in Western Mass. I wanted to build a piece that connects her many geniuses. She’s a writer, a fabric artist, a dancer, a violinist, a singer, and a great thinker. I wanted to bring all these parts together on one stage and then share that fusion of her with our community. We’ve never seen anything like Terry Jenoure; strap on your seatbelts!”
MY BRONX will be offered in conjunction with a therapeutic dance workshop for special needs youth by Maria Mitchell on July 10 from 3-5 pm at Community Yoga, 16 Federal Street, Greenfield, MA. This is a parent/child workshop for children aged 7-10 by world renowned dancer and movement therapist, Maria Mitchell and the cost is $15 with scholarships available. Siblings welcome – to register please contact: lmciner@gmail.com
Supported by the Emily List Fund for Performing Arts Therapy.
Johnny Got His Gun and conversation with Bob and Lee Woodruff
Here is the full video of the performance and conversation on youtube “Johnny Got His Gun” directed by Kevin Maroney is based upon a radio play that was broadcast in March, 1940, starring James Cagney. The radio play is an adaptation of Dalton Trumbo’s novel (Trumbo was one of the “Hollywood 10,” the first members of the infamous “Blacklist,”) whose main character, Joe Bonham, is horribly wounded in World War I. The play brilliantly explores what happens to a mind isolated from the outside world except for a sense of touch, pain and vibration. What happens? The mind has no choice but to think, to attach to every shred of information it is lucky enough to perceive, and to be patient. What it can’t prevent is the slow drift toward a kind of frustrated mania obsessing about every idea it has. The Old Deerfield Productions cast includes Nico Lawson as Joe, with James Cameron Emery, Emma Jimerson, Joan Holiday, and A.J. Maroney in the other roles.
Given of the graphic, controversial and current nature of the subject of the play, we will balance the evening with a conversation following the show. The conversation promises to be a symposium on the effects of war upon soldiers, a reflection on how to help our vets when they return from war, what issues must be dealt with, and the role of the arts in presenting such themes. Our conversation participants include: Bob Woodruff, former ABC World News Tonight anchor who was wounded while reporting from Iraq and founder of The Bob Woodruff Foundation, a national nonprofit that helps ensure our nation’s injured service members, veterans and their families return to a homefront ready to support them (remind.org); Lee Woodruff, best selling author (THOSE WE LOVE MOST, IN AN INSTANT) , speaker, CBS Morning Show Correspondent and spouse of Bob; David Pakman, progressive radio and television program host; Buz Eisenberg, attorney for detainees at Guantanamo; Kathy Belanger, whose son Greg was one of the first soldiers killed in Iraq; Lieutenant Colonel Naval Flight Officer Hank Detering, USMC Vietnam veteran; Rev. Andrea Avazian, Senior Pastor of the Haydenville Congregational Church, an activist in movements for social and political change since 1970 and Linda McInerney, Artistic Director of Old Deerfield Productions.
Said McInerney, “This is a hard hitting play that has as deep an impact today as it did in 1940. Perhaps more, as we face the challenges of so many more of our soldiers coming home with injuries. Joe comes back from WWI a shattered person alone in his shell of a body. The visceral experience of seeing the world through his sensibilities is one that is hard to forget. We have a terrific cast of actors who will bring this amazing human drama to life. But I want to be clear that we aren’t offering this play to further divide us. We have invited some incredible people to join us in conversation about the ways that we can come together on this issue. It is our goal to invite our panelists to converse about how we can be of help our veterans when they come home, what their challenges are, what we can learn from their experience/stories, and how we can come together as a people to understand more, listen more, and reconcile more. This is not an “us versus them” event, not about hawks and doves, nor red against blue. This is a conversation about carrying out right action and healing. We have offered free tickets to the Veterans Tickets Foundation http://www.vettix.org/ and are offering free tickets to any who identify themselves as Vets simply by contacting me at lmciner@gmail.com. We are also actively seeking to connect with Veterans service organizations so if any readers have connections or ideas, please ask them to contact me.”
Tickets are $10, $12 and premium front row seats $20.
Summer Program for Children at Eaglebrook School in August
SORRY SOLD OUT.
August 5-9 and 12-16
Old Deerfield Productions will offer their Summer Program for Children at Eaglebrook School the first two weeks of August. This year we will offer a single two week session. This is a holistic program where the children ages 8 through 12 have the opportunity to create original work, collaborate, cooperate and enjoy the beauty of Pocumtuck Ridge and the wonderful Eaglebrook campus in Deerfield and perform for their parents at the end of the session.
The cost is $550 for the two week session with a limit of 12 children. A check may be made payable to Old Deerfield Productions at 7 Memorial Street, Deerfield, MA 01342. Deposit of $50 to reserve your spot is required at registration with remainder due by June 15. For more information call Linda at 413-774-4527.
Founded in 1922, Eaglebrook School is a located on 750 acres along Pocumtuck Ridge in Deerfield, MA just off of Routes 5 and 10 in the village of Old Deerfield. The Percival Theatre is a 260 seat theatre featuring beautiful acoustics and flexible seating. For directions: www.eaglebrook.org
Our teacher: Bill Stewart teaches in the Leverett Elementary School and has taught theater workshops for young actors since 1995. He has played the roles of writer, director, Ultimate Frisbee Player, archaeologist, and especially actor, where he has performed as princes, monsters, & cowboys. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Playwrighting/Performance and a Master’s Degree in Education from the University of Massachusetts.