Madwoman of Chaillot coming to Greenfield
Coming June 29, 30 and July 1,6,7,8, 2012 – The Madwoman of Chaillot, the perfect play for now, the perfect play for Greenfield will take downtown by storm. Tickets will be available here on May 24.
Written in 1943, the play is startlingly relevant to the world today. Crazy-like-a-fox Mme. de Chaillot, played by Jeannine Haas, rallies her devoted if eccentric community to save itself from the corrupt corporate executives who plot to dig up Paris to get to the oil they believe to be beneath the city streets. Featuring downtown Greenfield as the City of Light with local luminaries playing themselves in cameo roles, street performers aflutter on the Common, and ArtsBlock a Parisian café, you will see that, “nothing is ever so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can’t set it right in the course of an afternoon”.
SOLD OUT! Summer Program at Eaglebrook, AUGUST 2012
There are no more places available- let me know if you want to be on our wait list – lmciner@gmail.com
We are delighted to announce the third year of our Summer Theatre Program at Eaglebrook School for children ages 8-12. We are happy to offer master teacher Bill Stewart as our guide and the dates will be August 6-10 and second session, August 13-17.
August 6-10, 2012 Mystery!!
Join us for a week-long theater camp in which we will create an original mystery play. Detectives, red herrings, suspicious characters, false trails, villains, side-kicks, and super sleuths galore! WIll the audience be able to solve the mystery before the detectives can solve the case? Did the butler do it? Join us if you dare!
August 13-17, 2012 Shakespeare!!
Come play in the imagination of the world’s greatest writer! Heroes and villains, monsters and clowns, kings and fools, queens and servants: Shakespeare wrote about them all. We’ll try on those characters, then borrow the Bard’s language, his settings, and his stories to perform a patchwork of Shakespearean scenes or a full blown play at week’s end. Come wag the Bard’s tale!
Running time of camp, 9 am to 3 pm with mornings devoted to theater games and then on to rehearsal. Lunch will be provided in the beautiful Gibbs Dining Hall. Recess will take place in the afternoon with activities including swimming in Schwab Pool, walking to the Rock, playing on the fields, and enjoying the gym. Performance each Friday afternoon to showcase week’s work with parents and friends invited to each performance.
The cost is $250 per session with a limit of fifteen 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.
Richie Davis' article on TRUTH
Old Deerfield Productions readies premiere of Sojourner Truth opera
By RICHIE DAVIS
Bulletin Contributing Writer
Friday, February 10, 2012
It began with a dream.
While trying to imagine how she could follow Old Deerfield Productions’ original opera “The Captivation of Eunice Williams” with another success, artistic director Linda McInerney dreamed she was sitting in Northampton’s Academy of Music with composer Paula Kimper. They were watching singer Evelyn Harris, who was onstage, wearing a mid-19th century costume and about to sing.
She’d seen both women earlier that evening in a theater lobby and when she awoke, realized she’d envisioned Harris portraying 19th-century abolitionist Sojourner Truth in her next collaboration with Kimper.
“Whoa! That’s perfect!” thought McInerney, who felt like she’d been given marching orders by her subconscious.
“Truth” was born that night in the summer of 2009. Now the world premiere of the opera, with Harris in the title role, is set for Feb. 16 through 18 at the Academy of Music.
But the work could as well be called “Trust.”
“It’s a leap of faith because I have no doubt that if this came in a dream, this is what it wanted to be. … I’ve lived as if this is what it wants to be for those 2½ years,” said McInerney, who describes herself as a “53-year-old, middle-aged housewife who’s pretty white.”
Producer-director McInerney set off on that “leap” – or “bushwhacking,” as she describes it – along with Kimper, Harris and award-winning playwright Talaya Delaney, whose Harvard doctorate focused on transforming historical characters into theater scripts.
This was a true collaborative, artistic journey of discovery for these women.
“This has been the largest production I’ve done in my entire life,” McInerney said. There’s a larger cast than the 2004 opera “Captivation,” a more sweeping span of time, a full orchestra … “and, I have to say, bigger ideas, too.”
Along the way, McInerney raised $64,000 with the help of the online fundraising site Kickstarter and by reaching out to private and corporate donors and winning six grants. Right from the get-go, Kickstarter’s pump-priming was supercharged with a video of Harris presenting Sojourner Truth’s powerful 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech to the Ohio Women’s Rights convention.
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! … I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?”
Harris, a thin, red-haired woman with penetrating eyes and a deep, soulful voice, is best known for her years in the women’s a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. She has lived in the Pioneer Valley for a dozen years, singing, leading choruses and teaching voice at Northampton Commuton Community Music Center.
She feels comfortable depicting Truth, but says acting doesn’t come easy.
“I know how to be hired to sing, but being paid to act and sing is daunting for me,” said Harris, who lives in Easthampton. She hadn’t done any acting since she was in college. “Sojourner ages in the piece also, so there are a lot of emotions that have to be covered. It’s a lot of work. I rely on my instincts because I’m black, I’m a woman, I’m a singer, I’m 61 years old, so I’ve been doing it a long time. But I’ve never done an opera before, so I want to be as good as I can.”
Then again, Harris makes clear this opera is a folk opera, which Kimper has based on spirituals and other African-American traditions. And she doesn’t let the term “opera” get in the way any more than her liberating character would have.
“I don’t ask those kinds of questions,” Harris says. “I leave it to the creators to make it work. Once you know a medium is out there, it’s for everyone to use. You use what you need to save your own life and you save the rest for the next person.”
Truth was born into slavery in 1797 as Isabella Baumfree. She escaped slavery, and in the 1840s, while advocating women’s rights and abolition as Sojourner Truth, joined a utopian community in Northampton.
“It feels like me,” Harris said. “It feels like all the other black women I know. When someone says, ‘Oh, wow! This thing’s been written for you!’ I say, ‘I’m just one of the many black woman who could play this part.’”
Harris, like McInerney, says she’d known “just the peripheral things” about Truth, like her role as someone born to slavery who became a pioneering, liberated woman.
As an actress, she says, “You have to be on the whole time and show your growth, your maturity, and be a mom and a fighter, and be an individual. She was all of that. She was born with it and, for her, there were no models and she was definitely making it up as she went along.”
Gathering treasures
The same step-by-step discovery has been true for McInerney, who began by searching for the 40 cast members and simultaneously researching the life of Truth. She’d buy three copies of whatever biographies she could find, including children’s books, and send them to composer Kimper and librettist Delaney. They would explore and discuss the materials at weekly meetings, developing a script that began with Truth as a 20-year-old slave near New Paltz, N.Y.
“We spent a solid eight months just reading and talking every week,” said McInerney, who drove to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Delaney was teaching at Vassar College. Kimper took a train from New York.
“We’d just imagine it through, sit with a cup of tea and came up with a structure, ideas, scenes from material we’d read the week before. We’d say, ‘Could you believe that part? What must have that like been like?’ “
Kimper, McInerney says, specializes in composing opera “embodying the idiom of the story in time.” Kimper began developing the musical score after the first scene was written.
“There had to be a few pages of the first scene written before I could begin writing the music,” Kimper said in a recent interview. She continued orchestrating the work right up until Martin Luther King Day.
Harris, too, says she was interested in being involved from the moment McInerney first told her about her dream. “But I told her, ‘I need to see the music,’ “ she recalled with a laugh. “We were around a year and half before we saw the first sheet of music. I wasn’t going to commit …”
Kimper’s score is written specifically with Harris’ almost baritone voice in mind, rather than that of a more typical operatic soprano, the composer said.
“Evelyn has a very, very deep voice, and Sojourner Truth was famous for having a deep voice. She’s basically singing an octave lower than I’m writing it,” Kimper said. “One of the first concepts before any music had been written was that she’d be allowed to improvise. She’s felt free to move within that and we’re only at the very beginning of what she can do with that. There are a few places in the score where it’s noted ‘ad lib,’ with a few cue notes, but I’ve told her to take it wherever she wanted to take that, since she’s really creating the role. And I’ve transcribed some of the things she’s doing into the score for a permanent record.”
As the script was being developed, rehearsals began with a cast – whose members in some cases had auditioned for parts that hadn’t even been written yet.
Surprises
Harris’ insight into the title character has seemed “astonishing” for someone with no acting training, McInerney said.
“I’ve been able to work with Evelyn as a master actor because of the depth of her approach and the way she works. It has to do with the way she embodies a song as her way of working and her way of being. She uses so much of her physical self, her spiritual self, her psychological self.”
McInerney may have contemplated having to teach the untrained actress a lot, but says, “If anything, she’s taught me. And it’s been really great.”
Kimper, McInerney and Delaney pored through multiple accounts of Truth’s life, from sanitized books to bloated articles that dealt with isolated incidents. Then, in the middle of their search, McInerney spotted in New York Review of Books the release of a new, definitive biography of Truth by Cornell University historian Margaret Washington.
Another discovery was when the three women stumbled on Pinkster, the African-American spring festival – the word derives from a Dutch word for Pentecost – held in the Northeast during the early-19th century, when slaves were allowed time off from work and given a chance to enjoy music, dance and food that harkened back to their African heritage.
“It was essentially an African fertility ceremony, translated into a celebration for the enslaved,” McInerney said. “It’s Mardi Gras, a frenzy of activity, dancing and food, with a Pinkster King, who was voted for.”
In the opera, Pinkster became a metaphor for the spiritual turmoil that slaves experienced in the days before emancipation in New York State in 1827 (Massachusetts had emancipated slaves more than 40 years earlier). Pinkster was incorporated into the opera as a “time to turn things upside down,” which Truth would probably have experienced when she was growing up. The scene – with help from Whately percussionist Tony Vacca and African dancer Abdou as the Pinkster King – draws on the first-hand experience of McInerney and Kimper, who last May visited a recreated Pinkster ceremony in New York’s Hudson Valley.
“It was just one of many surprises along the way,” McInerney said. Then, sounding a little like the opera’s title character, she added, “I just feel so guided and protected in this. That’s why the ‘leap of faith’ piece has been really simple.”
That serendipity applies even for the timing of the upcoming premiere, which was originally planned for last November, but which had to be rescheduled for February. Only in January did McInerney learn that this February’s Black History Month theme would be African-American women’s contributions to the making of America.
“It’s been like that every step of the way,” McInerney said. The synchronicity with which “Truth” has fallen together “is changing my life. I’ve never had it where I’ve done [a project] without question, with a deep, open heart, with no idea of what the payoff’s going to be. You let it all go, and I feel like I’m about 4 years old right now, maybe 2. I feel I know absolutely nothing. And it’s very freeing.”
‘I take my freedom’
The folk opera opens in 1817 near New Paltz, where 20-year-old Baumfree, as Sojourner Truth was known then, confronts her master, who’s tried to renege on his promise of her early freedom.
She sings:
“The master will keep his promise. I am strong where he is weak. I’ll make truth of his lie … Lord, true as you made me, I take what you’ve given me, I take my freedom.”
Carrying her infant daughter, Sophie, on her back, Baumfree escapes to her freedom, leaving behind three other children who would not be legally free under the 1827 emancipation order. The opera follows her pioneering court battle in 1827 to protect her young son, Peter, from being sold out of state.
The opera follows Baumfree two years later to New York City, where she tries to protect her son from getting in trouble with the law. There, the abolitionist preacher, who in the opera sings, “I hear God in the night, in my sleep … I hear God in the halls, in the streets,” is drawn in by religious charlatan Robert Matthews, who’s renamed himself the Prophet Matthias. She joins his religious cult – “The Kingdom of Matthias” and works for him as a housekeeper from 1832 to 1833. He’s arrested for a murder; Baumfree is arrested as an accomplice and is accused of trying to poison a white couple in the cult. Baumfree is found innocent and files and wins a slander suit against the couple – the first black person ever to win such a suit.
In 1843, “the voice of God” gives her the name Sojourner Truth, and she walks to Springfield and then Florence, where she joins the utopian Northampton Association of Education and Industry. She becomes an outspoken abolitionist and feminist working with Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, David Ruggles, Frances Gage and others.
The new opera, parts of which have been previewed in Deerfield, Northampton and New York City, concludes in Washington, D.C., where in 1865, Truth is seen bandaging the wounds of black Civil War veterans at Freedmen’s Hospital and bemoaning the wounds of her own son.
“The war is won. The freedmen come by the thousands. … Smallpox! Typhoid! Nowhere to live! Nothing to eat! … Is this our freedom. What war has been won?”
McInerney said the hardest part of building the opera was deciding how to end it. To leave its powerful main character losing her vibrancy as her life trails off toward its end – at age 86 in 1883 – would not have been right, she said.
Instead, it’s a child – a fictional character – who appears to tell a dispirited Truth:
“My mama was born a slave, oh Lord. Says you sang her free when you sang, ‘I see the same moon; I see the same stars. When we die, we shall both go to the same heaven.’”
Shouting “a little louder,” as she does at the beginning of the opera, Sojourner Truth proclaims that “Yes, we’ll get to heaven, but first, there’s work still to be done.”
McInerney got tearful as she described how the opera’s ending comes together, much as the creation of this work has been realized, as an act of faith.
“It was very important to us to end the piece in a way that ‘The Work Must Still Be Done,’” she said. “One of things that we don’t think about Sojourner Truth: She really built the foundation along with those people, she built the cornerstones of the edifice that is the Civil Rights movement, (which) still is building, as we know so well. She built some serious cornerstones. …. We wanted to express that: That happened then, and here we are now.”
Tickets for “Truth” are available on the Academy of Music website, www.academyofmusictheatre.com or by phone at 584.9032, ext.
Tickets to TRUTH ON SALE
TICKETS ON SALE NOW
Tickets to the premiere of TRUTH at the Academy of Music Theatre in Northampton, MA at 274 Main Street, Northampton, MA will go on sale on November 22, 2011 – the website for the Academy is www.academyofmusictheatre.com and their box office phone is: 413.584.9032 ×105 or email boxoffice@academyofmusictheatre.com
The Premiere of TRUTH, a new folk opera about the life of Sojourner TRUTH will take place on February 16, 17, 18, 2012 at 7:30 pm. With full orchestra under conductor, Hugh Keelan, music direction by Jerry Noble, sets rendered by Amy Johnquest, and lights by Lara Dubin, TRUTH illuminates the life and legacy of this complicated, brilliant woman who, though illiterate, was a relentless and articulate champion of those deprived of justice and freedom, and whose influence has for too long been overlooked. The score by Paula M. Kimper and libretto by Talaya Delaney are accessible and down-to-earth, much of the music derived from folk themes and spirituals, and many of the words Sojourner’s own.
Featuring Evelyn Harris, formerly of Sweet Honey in the Rock, as Sojourner Truth, who lived a life of bravery in the face of unfathomable adversity and never wavered in her faith and hope for a world where all would experience the birthright of freedom. Her nearly unknown story that is filled with astonishing accomplishments and events will, for the first time, be told in a full-length folk opera. Sojourner Truth is a heroine of extraordinary scope whose life story, when heard, will be an inspiration to many.
Double-Take Fringe November 11,12, 2011
‘Flying on faith’ Greenfield Recorder, Nov. 3, 2011
Richie Davis
11 plays will be staged in downtown Greenfield during Double Take Fringe Theater Festival debut Nov. 11, 12
Some people visit Greenfield’s annual Brick + Mortar International Video Art Festival and are wowed by intriguing electronic art installations in unusual spaces — like the former hotel rooms on the fourth floor of Wilson’s Department Store, or the cavernous First National Bank on Bank Row. But the ever-creative Linda McInerney of Old Deerfield Productions looked beyond the video installations and saw ways of bringing these downtown spaces even more to life.
“I loved seeing the renaissance of Greenfield, everything that’s happening, and have that be sort of an engine,” said McInerney. I thought, ‘Why not do the same thing with theater?’” From Brick + Mortar was born Double Take Fringe Theater Festival, which will take place at 11 locations within walking distance of downtown Greenfield on Nov. 11 and 12.
Fringe theater, a concept which began in 1947 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and has spread to New York, Orlando, Austin and Seattle, as well as Edmonton and Winnipeg in Canada, involves small theater works in multiple nearby venues that make use of vacant spaces.
Working with Becky George of the Greenfield Business Association, downtown building owner Mark Zaccheo, Hollywood production assistant Michael Haley of Conway and Historic Deerfield Marketing Director Marc Belanger, McInerney looked around at the space available at the Arts Block and The Pushkin Gallery downtown. The possibilities started giving her goosebumps.
The group looked around for other possible spaces, found nearly a dozen, and then, in May, she zipped off an email to as many thespians and theater companies that popped into her head, “just to see what people would say.”
With just one exception, McInerney said, “Every single person I emailed said ‘yes.’” Within a matter of weeks, each would round up a play to produce, along with actors.
“I love our community,” McInerney exudes. “I put it out on Facebook saying I was looking for two actors and a director. Within 11 minutes, the thing was set.”
She asked for people to come up with productions of 30 to 40 minutes to fill the 11 venues, which include All Souls and Second Congregational churches, the old Carr Hardware store on Wells Street and upstairs at Hope & Olive restaurant.
Sarah Marcus, a recent New York transplant who teaches drama at Bement School and has worked with McInerney at Old Deerfield Productions, called Phoebe Shaw, who had moved to the area about 10 years ago and had been involved in the Northampton Playwrights Lab. Together, they came up with “Vault,” a comedy written especially for The Pushkin.
“The first thing we saw there was the vault,” Shaw said in recalling their first visit to the former Main Street bank last spring. “We got kind of excited because it’s such a relic and it’s so unremovable.”
Together, they created a three-person play of just under half an hour about the encounter of two women who want to gain access to the vault “It kind of has an element of magic theater to it,” said Shaw of the play, which will be directed by Marissa Elkins.
John Reese’s students participated three times at the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival before his retirement from teaching theater at Deerfield Academy. During the fringe festival, he will direct the dark comedy “Chamber Music” at the old Carr Hardware space. He calls it a “fascinating play” he’d directed a couple of times before. It depicts a mental institution in 1938 inhabited by Amelia Earhart, Joan of Arc, Gertrude Stein, Queen Isabella, Susan B.
Anthony and three other powerful women.
“The play lends itself to bare-bones treatment,” with the former retail space’s linoleum neutral walls and clear-glass cinderblock, which is back lit by streetlights, providing a fitting institutional setting.
“I think this is going to be great fun,” said Reese, who is also on the board of Old Deerfield Productions. “We’ve wanted to develop more of an audience in Greenfield because of all the things that are beginning to happen around the Arts Block and The Pushkin. I think there’s an untapped audience in Greenfield and this will have something for everybody.”
With tickets set at $10 per evening, or both evenings for $15, the festival is priced to attract “Joe Average and his wife” to take a risk on a short play,” said Haley. (Those tickets are available from the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce, World Eye Bookshop, Raven Used Books and online at www.double-take.org) Haley, who has visited the Irish Dundalk Fringe Festival, is translating some of his production skills from Hollywood movies like “A League of Their Own,” “Groundhog Day” or “Analyze This” to the upcoming Double Take Fringe Festival in Greenfield.
“A lot of people are excited,” said Haley, who’s also playing a role in the first act of the drama “North Country,” which he codirects, at the Arts Block’s Wheelhouse. “It’s about exposure, exposure. I think it’s very exciting. It can be a lot of fun.”
George, who’s also helping to coordinate the festival for the Greenfield Business Association, said, “Different kinds of cultural arts attract different people. The interesting thing about providing theater in this way is that it will allow those people who are ‘not theater people’ to come out and enjoy a halfhour play.”
No, George said, “This is not your mother’s play; you’re going to sit down for half an hour and be entertained.”
Here, in “some more cultured spaces and some raw spaces,” there’ll be something for everyone, she figures.
Whether it’s a dark comedic farce that pokes fun at our short attention spans, (“Cold Storage”) or Elvis’ story told through the eyes of 17 women (“All the King’s Women”), or even improved comedy-on-the-couch (“Shrink: Where Freud Meets Funny”), Double Take will offer a varied mix and a schedule for both people who don’t normally stay out late and the more late-blooded.
“If you’ve enjoyed one play, you can go off and try to get into another venue and see another one,” said George. “And if you miss something because it was at the same time, you can come back and the next night and see it. That’s some of the beauty of the way it’s structured.”
There’s even an “interactive process performance” just for kids at the young person’s friendly time of 4 p.m. In “Picture Book Play,” local theatre artist SerahRose Roth and her mom, Greenfield Community College professor Sharon Roth, will help children stretch their creative wings as they explore physical and vocal expression in a collaborative improvisation that will turn a favorite picture book into spontaneous performance.
McInerney ticked off the names of places around the country that swell with annual fringe theater productions, adding, “Some are huge and last more than a month. But I don’t know of any other small towns that are doing it.”
Nearby Northampton, which might be a candidate for hosting a fringe theater, is “further down the evolutionary scale,” said McInerney. “Everything there’s very expensive” to try to mount a festival in various nooks and crannies downtown.
But in Greenfield, she said, there’s a “transitional quality and the burgeoning creative economy that’s just coming to life here is opening the door. The moment is now. It couldn’t have quite happened five years ago, because everybody would have said, ‘What are you talking about?’” Creating this kind of event at this moment, in this place, also reflects on the fact that nobody’s getting paid to make it happen, McInerney admits. And that think-outside-thecoffers attitude doesn’t necessarily exist in a lot of places.
“Here people have that mindset still,” says McInerney, acknowledging that if the festival gets off the ground, it may be able to build a “nest egg” to pay for extras like lighting and have it be not quite so bare bones.
“We’re flying on faith a little bit here.
Faith is good,” said McInerney, who takes little credit for seeing Greenfield festooned with a fringe festival other than daring to raise the idea.
“It popped out of my mouth — this mouth.
I happen to own this mouth, for some reason, but the moment it was said, it just wanted to manifest. It’s a sort of an idea that’s yearning to happen. I’m grateful I got to utter the words, but it’s a credit to where Greenfield is and where our creative community is.”
On the Web: www.double-take.org