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In light of the turbulent national debate over political polarization, freedom of speech and racism, what we take away from theater may matter more than ever.
On Sept. 15 and 16, the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College will present Antigone in Ferguson from the Brooklyn-based company Theater of War.
Under the artistic direction of Bryan Doerries, Theater of War looks at chronic issues affecting modern society through the lens of ancient Greek drama.
In an era of heated, frequently unilluminating arguments about contentious issues, Doerries said in a recent phone interview from New York, “the beauty of the model of using ancient texts” is that they offer a distant mirror, a way of seeing and discussing an issue without immediately putting up a defensive wall.
Antigone in Ferguson is a staged reading of excerpts from the Sophocles play, which begins after two brothers have been killed during a siege of Thebes. The king, Creon, promises that Eteocles, who died defending the city, will be accorded a ceremonial burial, while the body of Polyneices, who besieged Thebes, will be left to rot. In defiance of Creon’s decree, the brothers’ sister Antigone buries Polyneices, for which Creon condemns her to death.
The parallels between the events of Antigone and what happened in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, when African-American teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer, are striking.
Brown’s body was left out on the street for four hours in blazing sun, which was seen by many people across the community and country as a flagrant lack of compassion and respect.
When Doerries, who had brought other performances to Missouri, was asked by people he knew in state government to go into Ferguson, he felt “great trepidation.”
Who was he, as an outsider and a white man, he said, to take on such a charged issue?
But, he added, “eventually it felt like such a necessity. It moved the company in a whole new direction. We are doing things about issues that are even more close to the bone.”
Antigone in Ferguson is accompanied by a gospel music score written by the director of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Choir. It is performed by choir members from Ferguson and law enforcement officers from St. Louis; the Hopkins Center performance will also include members of the Dartmouth College Gospel Choir.
What makes the staged readings by Theater of War so resonant, said Margaret Lawrence, the director of programming at the Hopkins Center, is the lengthy discussion that follows between actors and audience.
“Art creates a space where people can come in,” she said.
The aim with the post-reading conversation is to move beyond stubbornly-held opinion to a more reflective response, Doerries said. “What do you see of yourself in this? What connection do you make?”
The cast includes Zach Grenier, as Creon. Perhaps most familiar to audiences from his long-running role as a lawyer on the CBS drama The Good Wife, Grenier has previously participated in Theater of War readings, although this is his first outing as Creon.
The Greek plays, he said, give the audience license to look at hard topics without feeling personally attacked. “You can have the courage to discuss something that you can’t discuss if it’s too close to you,” Grenier said.
Rounding out the cast is, as Antigone, Tracie Thoms, who has been seen on Broadway in the musical Falsettos. Actors Duane Foster, Marjolaine Goldsmith and Willie Woodmore, who have read in other Theater of War productions, complete the company.
The performance begins at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, Sept. 15 and 16, in the Moore Theater.
The discussion will include local speakers: Keiselim A. Montás, Dartmouth’s interim director of safety and security and college proctor; Rachel Edens, assistant dean and advisor to first generation and low income students, and interim assistant dean and advisor to black students; Al Patterson, retired police officer; and Olivia Lapierre, environmental and racial justice activist and chair of the Hartford Committee on Racial Inequity.
Also at the Hopkins Center, in early January, the Moore Theater hosts a production that examines issues not far removed from those explored in Antigone in Ferguson — race, class and the ramifications of slavery — but from a Latin American perspective. The Chilean theater company Teatro Sur, based in Santiago, stages Inutiles(Useless), a savage satire of what happens to a 17th-century wealthy family living in a frontier hacienda when their servants, indigenous Mapuche people who are the forced labor, revolt. The Chilean actor Tito Bustamante plays the outraged family matriarch. In Spanish with supertitles. Friday and Saturday, Jan. 5 and 6.
— Nicola Smith
Northern Stage
Northern Stage’s 21st season brings a diverse lineup to the Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction, a slate of plays that will serve both as escapism and as social commentary.
Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced centers on the upwardly mobile, Pakistani-American lawyer Amir Kapoor. He and his white wife, Emily, invite another couple over for a dinner party; what begins as a light-hearted affair quickly devolves into something darker.
“I love … how a dinner party really turns into a powder keg of resentment and pain and fear,” said Northern Stage’s producing artistic director Carol Dunne, who directs Disgraced. “How do we begin to see those around us who are struggling with prejudice? How do we as a community and region become part of the solution?” Disgraced is scheduled to run from Feb. 28 through March 18.
The world premiere of Only Yesterday, by Hollywood writer and Norwich resident Bob Stevens, runs from Jan. 31 through Feb. 18. Part of Northern Stage’s New Works Now program, which helps to develop and debut new work, Only Yesterday unfolds over one boozy night in a Key West hotel room, where a young Paul McCartney and John Lennon have holed up after a storm washes out their concert. Revelry ensues, but it gives way to the inevitable drunken bonding.
Dunne said the two Beatles come to some poignant revelations that fuel both their friendship and their music in the years to come.
Until then, Northern Stage will double the fun with its first-ever rotating repertory, staging concurrent productions of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Andy Dolan’s Robert Frost: This Verse Business.
Dunne said the thematic crossover between the shows will offer the chance to compare and contrast the themes in the two plays. Emmy-winning actor Gordon Clapp stars in both. The shows will run Sept. 20 through Oct. 29.
The holiday season at Northern Stage will kick off with an adaptation of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, by Howard Ashman, Alan Menken, Glen Slater and Doug Wright. Directed by Chad Larabee, who also directed Northern Stage’s holiday production of Mary Poppins in 2015, the well-known fairytale will take set design to the next level to “create a world both above and beneath the sea.” The Little Mermaid is scheduled to run Nov. 15 through Jan. 7.
For tickets or more information, call the box office at 802-296-7000.
— EmmaJean Holley
Shaker Bridge Theatre
Last year, to mark Shaker Bridge Theatre’s 10th anniversary, artistic director Bill Coons programmed an entire season of plays by women. This season, there is no particular theme that Coons can pick out. But, Coons added, “I don’t know that there’s a season that I’ve been this excited about before.”
He has secured the rights to bring to Enfield’s Whitney Hall a number of critically lauded works that have played fairly recently on and off Broadway.
“I literally can’t believe that what started out as, let’s find a place to do a couple of plays has turned into the 11th season now,” Coons said.
First up, running Oct. 5 to 22, is This by Melissa James Gibson, which earned terrific reviews when it ran off-Broadway in 2009. Four college friends–a married couple, a widow and a single gay man– now see middle age lurking around the corner, which brings with it the kind of questions and anxiety you’d expect. They gather together for a dinner, but, needless to say, the party doesn’t quite go off as planned.
“(Gibson) talks about being interested in the cusp between hilarity and tragedy, which I’m always fascinated with,” Coons said. “It’s an extremely witty play that ends up being extremely poignant.”
From Nov. 30 through Dec. 17, the theater presents the two-person play Dancing Lessons by Mark St. Germain. Coons previously staged St. Germain’s Freud’s Last Session. In Dancing Lessons, which unlike some of St. Germain’s plays is entirely fictional, a college professor on the autism spectrum hires a dancer who has suffered a possibly career-ending injury to teach him to dance. The occasion is an awards ceremony where the professor will be honored, and he doesn’t want to look foolish.
In mid-January Coons stages the two-person Constellations by British playwright Nick Payne. It plays with that oldest of devices — girl meets boy — but by spinning through all the possible permutations of an encounter between two intelligent, if socially awkward people, a beekeeper and a cosmologist.
For information and tickets go to shakerbridgetheatre.org, or call 603-448-3750.
— Nicola Smith
Parish Players
Actor Richard Crowley, familiar to audiences from appearances with Shaker Bridge and Parish Players, will present Vehicle for Change, a one-act play written by Crowley himself that will be performed with music on Oct. 7 and 8. The vehicle of the title is a New York City taxi, and the characters are the driver and the passengers who pile in and out of the cab over the course of one night. The suggested donation is $10. The proceeds from the play will go to help a local family whose daughter suffered a paralyzing injury. For information and tickets call 802-785-4344 or email Richard Crowley at rjsee11@gmail.com.
— Nicola Smith
The Grange Theater At ArtisTree
Continuing its Music Theater Festival, the Grange Theater at ArtisTree in Pomfret presents the 1971 phenomenon Godspell, by Stephen Schwartz, from Sept. 14 through Oct 1. The Marvelous Wonderettes, an affectionate spoof of and homage to 1950s and early 1960s girl groups and cheerleading squads, runs from Oct. 6 to 22. For information and tickets go to artistreevt.org or call 802-457-3500.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com. EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.