Seventh Sister gives new plays an audience — and a chance
By Jane Holahan
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:40
You may be writing furiously, with ideas flowing, but you can never know how your play will translate onto the stage until it’s up there being produced.
That’s the great catch-22 of playwrighting.
How will actors shape certain characters? Will audiences respond the way you hope they will? Will the laughs come when they should? Will people be intrigued by your ideas or just confused?
And will the director give new meaning to your words?
There’s no way of knowing until a theater makes the commitment to produce your play. But what theater can afford to produce a play that’s never been performed before?
Theater of the Seventh Sister has come to the rescue for three playwrights, offering them actors, audiences and talk backs.
Their Project Genesis series is presenting staged readings of three new plays that have never been seen by audiences before.
The project began last weekend with “Cry Christiana Morning,” a story about Will Parker, who was at the center of the slave resistance in Christiana on Sept. 11, 1851, which some have called the first shot of the Civil War.
Three performances were held over the weekend, with a cast of 11 reading from scripts. Some cast members played a number of roles and several of them served as narrators.
There was no set, no costumes and little lighting or other tricks of the theater, but as Gary Smith, one of the founders of Seventh Sister noted, that nakedness served to better reveal what worked or didn’t work.
The New Jersey playwright, Harry Kendall, was there to watch the play and participate in the talk back that took place afterward.
“Cry Christiana Morning” still has some rough passages. I found some of the scenes confusing and I wondered if Kendall was, at times, trying too hard to educate his audience rather than tell a flesh and blood story..
The old adage “show me, don’t tell me” is the hardest thing for a writer to do. Some of Kendall’s scenes were telling things that needed to be shown.
But having said that, Kendall’s play has plenty of power and potential.
Will Parker is a fascinating character as seen through Kendall’s writing and Robert Brinson’s strong performance.
And there were times when the play was downright lyrical.
This is a part of America and Lancaster County’s history that we all need to know more about. More importantly, from the standpoint of the theater, it’s something I suspect we all want to know more about.
Seeing a play that is still being developed requires some patience. Seeing a staged reading, in which some actors are deeper into their characters than others and there are no diversions like pretty costumes or sets, requires patience.
But getting to see a play being born is fascinating, too. You get to see how an actor can overwhelm a character and make it his own. Other times you can see that the power of words trumps everything else.
The next new play in the series is John Rohrkemper’s “All Greek To Me,” running Nov. 18-20. Rohrkemper, a Seventh Sister veteran, is a featured player in “Cry Christiana Morning.”
And then, “Get Carter” by Barry Oshry, gets its debut June 9-11.
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Jane Holahan is a New Era staff writer. Her column appears every other week.
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