Alabama
Shakespeare Festival (05/10/2015)
ASF's Festival of Plays begins Friday
Teri Greene, Montgomery Adviser, May 4, 2015
Montgomery, Alabama
Story Highlights
• WHEN: Friday,
Saturday and May 10
• WHERE: The Alabama Shakespeare
Festival, 1 Festival Drive in Montgomery's Blount Cultural Park
• ADMISSION/INFORMATION: Choose from a
variety of packages: Tickets to readings of the Festival of New Plays
are $15 for general admission and $10 for students Friday or Saturday
evening: $45 includes reading, dinner & talk-back event.
Saturday morning: $26 includes reading, lunch & talk-back
event. The morning of May 10: $26 includes breakfast, reading and
talk-back event. Meal reservations must be made by 5 p.m. Tuesday by
calling or e-mailing the ASF Box Office: 271-5353 or boxoffice@asf.net.
This is the week that's been blocked off on every theater enthusiast's
calendar for months.
It's the Alabama Shakespeare Festival's annual
Festival of Plays. The
event includes multiple opportunities to see top productions from the
soon-to-end repertory season, including the critically acclaimed
staging of Shakespeare's "King Lear" and "As You Like It" and Oscar
Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." It is also an opportunity to
see a slew of brand-new plays that have been workshopped at ASF through
the Southern Writers' Project and will have their first public readings
during the celebration.
"King Lear," "As You Like It" and "The Importance
of Being Earnest"
will soon depart ASF's stage, so now is the time to catch these classic
plays — or stop by for a repeat performance.
The Festival of New Plays lets theater-goers see into the process
behind what may have started out as rough draft of a play that has in
the past week been transformed through evaluations, suggestions and
advice from directors, dramaturgs and other theater experts. The
readings the audience will see is just the latest in a series of
sessions performed by equity actors, adjusting their performances as
the work evolves.
Nancy Rominger, associate director of ASF, starts
the process a year
ahead, poring over plays submitted for the festival and then, with her
staff, hand-picking the select plays that will be worth the immense
effort involved in the workshop process. The plays vary from modern-day
dramas and comedies to historical pieces — really, the sky's the limit.
But most of the plays chosen for workshopping are set in the South.
"We give a voice to Southern playwrights and
Southern stories that
might not (otherwise) ever be heard, and bring them to light," Rominger
said. "There's a wonderful history of gorgeous Southern storytelling,
from Faulkner on, that we can't lose. SWP cultivates and champions this
enriching aspect of our Southern heritage."
The festival caps off the year for the Southern
Writers' Project (SWP),
a program that develops plays by Southern playwrights. The readings
will be available to the public during the festival weekend, and
afterward, audiences can talk back to the playwright, sharing their own
thoughts about the play, in a sense, helping to shape it into what it
will be when it hits the stage at some point.
In January, the National Endowment for the Arts
announced that ASF
would be one of 875 nonprofit organizations nationwide to receive an
NEA Art Works grant. The $20,000 grant was to support the Southern
Writers' Project Festival of New Plays and Edward Morgan's play "Twenty
Seven," which had its world premiere Feb. 14 at ASF. That play was a
product of the SWP.
Noted SWP-workshopped plays that have had their
world premieres at ASF
include "Bear Country" by Michael Vigilant, "Gee's Bend" and "The
Flagmaker of Market Street," both by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder (whose
newest play is part of the current workshop) and "The Nacirema Society"
by Pearl Cleage and "Twenty-Seven" by Edward Morgan.
Here are the plays on the 2015 Festival lineup:
• "Much Ado About Willie" by Alex and Hana
Mironoff, to be read at 4
p.m. Friday.
In December 1794 an obscure 18-year-old London law
clerk named
William-Henry Ireland gave a document to his father, Samuel, a dealer
in antiquities. The paper bore the signature and seal of William
Shakespeare. The subsequent events gave rise to one of the greatest
literary scandals, and mysteries, of the 18th century.
• "Dauphin Island" by Jeffry Chastang (playwright
of past SWP play
"Blood Divided"), to be read at 10 a.m. Saturday.
Suspicion and fascination dovetail when, en route
from Detroit to a new
job on Dauphin Island, Selwyn Tate interrupts the self-imposed
isolation of Kendra in the Alabama woods. "Dauphin Island" dramatizes
the risks involved when two displaced souls intertwine.
• "What God Hath Wrought: a TransAtlantic Farce" by
John Walch
(playwright of past SWP play "In the Book of"), to be read at 4 p.m.
Saturday.
Meg is an all-star customer service fixer — but
when an ancient message
in Morse code appears on her screen, she is sent on a wild, woolly
journey back to the birth of global communications and the laying of
the first Transatlantic telegraph cable in Ireland. "A love story,
wrapped in a warm, unknowable, hilarious Irish burrito, with a dollop
of delish on top.
• "Sorrow's End" by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, to be
read at 10:30 a.m. May
10.
"Sorrow's End" is a timely and exciting play about
cults and the exit
counsel that helps people leave the cult mindset. Using the framework
of an exit counseling that is much more than it appears to be, Sorrow's
End is an examination of family, loss and responsibility, as well as a
unique coming-of-age story.