This play is not so much set in the past as wrought out of the past. The sensuous elements of the play are vivid and persistent. It is filled with laughter, but that Flemish laughter that rings a bit with the gnashing of teeth! It is operatic in its sweep and in its tone. It is a vision of a dance of life in which the dancers – some riotous, some bewildered, some weary, some ecstatic – invite in a Stranger who unleashes a life-changing dream. What more can a theatre audience ask for?
Ghelderode, in an interview, said: “It is my climactic work. I put the whole of myself into it… it was a ten-year obsession. It is a kind of poem – a kind of ancestral lament – it contains comic and burlesque elements.

My mother once told me the story of a young girl she knew in the Louvain country who had died and, at the moment she was being put into her coffin, she opened her eyes! She had simply been in a trance. That could happen, could it not?”

This production follows in the THEATERWORK line of Tartuffe (Moliere); Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht); The Unicorn (Olson); The Threepenny Opera (Brecht); The Inspector General (Gogol); The Tempest (Shakespeare); The King Stag (Gozzi); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare); A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings (Cruz); The Imaginary Invalid (Moliere); and several small operas, zarzuelas and fantasy pieces for children.

Audiences have come to expect THEATERWORK’s creative team to surround the plays in beautiful sets, costumes, props and lighting they won’t be disappointed!

PERFORMANCES:

June 14 7:30 pm
June 15 7:30 pm
June 16 2:00 pm

June 20 7:30 pm
June 21 7:30 pm
June 22 7:30 pm
June 23 2:00 pm

James A. Little Theater (Corner of Cerrillos Road & St. Francis Drive)

For Information and Reservations: (505) 471-1799

POETRY OUT LOUD is a national program which is a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation and the state arts agencies of the United States. Its goal is to support artistic excellence, creativity and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities. It seeks to bring a vigorous presence of poetry in our culture, bringing the best poetry before the largest possible audience.

THEATERWORK has sustained a long-standing commitment to poetry and poets through performances, conferences, workshops and works with individual poets since its inception It has also worked with poets and great poetry to develop plays and other performance pieces.

NM arts website Poetry Out Loud

February 8 - 17th, February 2013

This play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz is set in Andalusia, Spain, where the restless ghost of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca still wanders through the streets and converses with the living.

BEAUTY OF THE FATHER introduces us to a young American woman who travels to this part of the world to meet her estranged, ex- pat father and becomes romantically involved with his Moroccan companion. This passionate story explores the conflict between love and sacrifice, desire and loyalty.

BEAUTY OF THE FATHER is not Nilo Cruz’s first play about Garcia Lorca, who was murdered by right-wing nationalists at the start of the Spanish Civil war. In 2003, his LORCA IN A GREEN DRESS took a more biographical look at the writer. “In Latin America the dead are very much a part of our lives”, says the 52 year old Cruz who came to the United States at age 10.

THEATERWORK produced LORCA IN A GREEN DRESS in its 2004-2005 Season to sold out houses. The playwright came to see it.

What some critics had to say:
” Cruz is a writer of ideas who fills the stage with a kind of lush dramatic literature, unifying character with thought and action in time and place.”

The New Yorker

” In spite of the contemporary flavor of Mr. Cruz’s plot, his stagecraft is delightfully old- fashioned. His characters are forever waxing poetic, reeling off elaborate soliloquies at te drop of a paint brush..”

The Wall Street Journal

Nilo Cruz

Cruz was born to Tina and Nilo Cruz, Sr. in Matanzas, Cuba. the family immigrated to the “Little Havana” neighborhood in Miami Florida in 1970. on a Freedom Flight. His interest in theater began with acting and directing in the early 1980′s. He studied theater first at Miami-Dade Community College, later moving to New York City, where he studied under fellow Cuban Maria Irene Fornes. Fornes recommended Cruz to Paula Vogel who was teaching at Brown University where he would receive an MFA in 1994.

In 2003 his play ANNA IN THE TROPICS was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Steinberg Award for Best New Play. A year later it received its Broadway premiere with Jimmy Smits in the lead role. He has since been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including two NEZ/ TCG National Theater Artist Residency grants, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award and a USA Artist Fellowship.

Cruz is an alumnus of New Dramatists, has taught playwriting at Brown University, University of Iowa and Yale University. His plays have been produced by New York’s Public Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, Pasadena Playhouse, McCarter Theatre, Oregon Shakespeare festival and many others nationally, including THEATERWORK in Santa Fe.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Garcia Lorca was born in the year 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, a few miles outside of Granada in the province of Andalusia, in southern Spain. From an early age he was fascinated by Spain’s mixed heritage, adapting its ancient folk songs, ballads, lullabies and flamenco music into his poems and plays. By the age of thirty he had published five books of poems and plays. In 1929-30 he studied in New York City, where he wrote the poems that were to be published posthumously as Poet in New York. On returning to Spain he devoted much of his attention to theater, “…the poetry which rises from the page…and becomes human”.

In 1936, at the outset of the Spanish Civil War, he was shot to death by anti-Republican rebels in Franco’s army and his books were banned and destroyed. He remains one of the most beloved writers of twentieth-century Spain and one of the world’s most influential poets. His work is admired for its passionate urgency and its haunting evocation of sorrow and loss. He spoke unforgettably of the otherness of nature, the demons of personal identity and artistic creation, sex, childhood and death.

“A brilliant uncertainty makes his work seem both miraculous and uneven, troubled when it looks calm, oddly smooth and authoritative…”
Michael Wood, New York Review of Books

THE PRODUCTION:

BEAUTY OF THE FATHER is a perfect fit for TW’s careful – yet daring – approach to making theater. It follows on work done in the first sixteen seasons in Santa Fe from Latino writers and subjects: Gonzales, Marquez, Fuentes, Zakarias, Serrano,Torroba, Marquez, Cruz … and pieces developed in New Mexico : Bataan,the Journey Home, Guadalupe! El Mundo Se Llena de Preguntas, Where Angels Come to Sing! …and others. THEATERWORK has deep roots in the international theater community from its roots in the Teatro Laboratorio in Bogota, Colombia; its landmark work in Minnesota ; and now its work in New Mexico.

This production will emphasize the presence of the poetry – the vision and sensibilities – of Lorca in every aspect. The set design is simple, poetic and evocative. It includes elements such as the moon, the sea, a stand of poplars. The props are very carefully selected to express the lives of the characters. Throughout he set are images – sometimes in miniature – that are drawn from the poetry of Lorca: nests, white roses, objects fro the sea, the color blue, nests, Spanish and Moroccan pieces. Lighting design has to suggest the passage of time, the intersection between dream and the everyday, an eclipse, a burst of purifying flames on the feast of San Juan… The sound score will include the sound of a restless sea, bird songs, distant flamenco guitar, bells, actual songs composed by Lorca sung live – and harder sounds to achieve -the movement of stone, ice, desire, solitude… bring your imaginations!

ARTISTIC STAFF:

David Matthew Olson, Director/ Set Design
Steve Carmichael, Lighting Design
Richard Gonzales, Props Master
Jack Sherman/ Technical Director
Paula Olson/ Sound Design
Laura Bailey, Stage Manager
Per Jerabek, Photography

CAST:

Jonathan Dixon…………..Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet
Tad Jones …………………. Emiliano, an American artist
Trish Vecchio ……………..Paquita, a Spanish woman
Vanessa Rios y Valles ….Marina, the daughter from America
Isaiah Rodriguez ……….. Karim, a young Moroccan perfumer

DATES/ TIMES

James A. Little Theater Corner of Cerrillos Road and Saint Francis Drive
(Campus of the New Mexico School for the Deaf)

Friday, February 8 @ 7:30 pm
Saturday, February 9 @ 7:30 pm
Sunday, February 10 @ 2:00 pm
Thursday, February 14 @ 7:30 pm
Friday, February 15 @ 7:30 pm
Saturday, February 16 @ 7:30 pm
Sunday, February 17 @ 2:00 pm

TICKETS: General Admission: $15.00
Students: $10.00

BOX OFFICE: Reservations / Information: (505) 471-1799

The play moves into the delicate relationship of three extraordinary women: Dorothea, the grandmother, a devoted eccentric; the brilliant daughter Artemis, who fled her mother’s world leaving her own daughter behind in it; and Echo, a child of exceptional intellect and awareness.  The characters move across time – suddenly speaking from the past in the blink of an eye.  They occupy a place of memory. The audience is drawn into places of silence and into the force of speech – speech just within reach, speech masking what lies between the women.

Lee Blessing was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  His first play, A Walk in the Woods (1988) was nominated for both a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize.  After that he entered the playwriting program at the University of Iowa where he received an MFA degree in Theater. He later returned to teach at the Iowa Playwrights’ Workshop.  He currently serves as Head of the Graduate Playwriting Program at Rutgers University.  Recent plays include A Body of Water, The Scottish Play, Thief River and Chesapeake.  He is the recipient of the Great American Play Award, American Theater Critics Association Award and many others.

ELEEMOSYNARY will be performed at the James A. Little Theater (in the chamber theater arrangement) starting on October 19.  It is directed by David Olson.  Actors for this production are:  Company Member, Angela Janda( Echo); Company Member, Trish Vecchio ( Artemis); and Guest Artist, Leslie Dillen (Dorothea).  Set/Props Designer: Richard Gonzales; Lighting Designer: Jack Sherman; Sound Designer/Composer: Paula Olson.

This is THEATERWORK’s one hundred and fifth production since moving its base to Santa Fe from Minnesota.  Productions have included Antigone, The Tempest, Inventing Van Gogh, Legacy of Light, The Drawer Boy, Rock Shore, The Sound of Music, Guadalupe!; great world classics; plays by living authors (some of whom have visited Santa Fe in connection with the production of their plays); works with music; Spanish zarzuelas; and new works by New Mexico playwrights. The Company has also worked in community projects around the state and has produced new pieces with young performers and writers.

Performance Dates/ Times:

Tickets:
General Admission:        $ 15.00
Students:                 $ 10.00

For Information or Reservations:  (505) 471-1799

James A Little Theater
Campus of the New Mexico School for the Deaf
1060 Cerrillos Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Performances: TBA

“Ms. McDonald writes in a confident, hypnotic style, woven from simple, cadenced prose and slightly off-center details
Audience members who are pursuing their own quests for spiritual comfort in the face of loss will surely find a story here that resonates for them.”
__ The New York Times

This production, performed by THEATERWORK veteran Jack Sherman, will be available in the Fall of 2013. To bring to your city, church or school please contact Paula Olson at mail@theaterwork.org for information and arrangements.

Santa Fe performances: TBA

“Brian Friel’s beautiful and dazzling MOLLY SWEENEY is one of those marvelous onion plays As you peel away each plump and juicy layer, another layer emerges underneath and yet another layer emerges underneath and yet another What a marvelous play this is! See it”
__ The New York Post

“Dispassionate eloquence and psychological honesty Brian Friel’s writing has such vitality and warmth, such kindly accuracy of observations.”
__ London Sunday Times

This production, with performances by THEATERWORK Company Members Vanessa Rios y Valles, Jonathan Dixon and Dan Friedman, is available for touring now. To bring it to your city, school or church contact Paula Olson at mail@theaterwork.org for information and to make arrangements.

EVENT # 1:

Wednesday, April 18 – 7:00 pm & Sunday, April 22 – 2:00 pm

COW PRINTS by Jennifer Lewis
A ten minute comedy directed by David Olson
THE APPLE TREE by Dianna Lewis
Thirty minute drama directed by Jonathan Dixon
MARE’S NEST by Dianna Lewis
Thirty minute drama directed by Vanessa Rios y Valles

EVENT #2:

Wednesday, April 25 – 7:00 pm & Sunday, April 29 – 2:00 pm

BLACK HOLE by Dianna Lewis
Two-act drama directed by Mario Cabrera

DIANNA A. LEWIS is the author of 25 plays. Productions of her work have been seen in theaters in 7 states over the last 15 years.
THEATERWORK produced THE NUMBER GIVER (1999) and PANGLOSS & PENNYPOCKET (2006). She is co-founder of Benchwarmers and Chamber Theatre.

JENNIFER LEWIS is the author of COW PRINTS, her first play. She is an art historian who did masters work in Art Crime in Italy and works at Patina Gallery in Santa Fe.

No reservation required.
Donations accepted.

For information: 505-471-1799
mail@theaterwork.org
www.theaterwork.org

Made possible in part by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax; New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts and by Friends of Theaterwork.

The plays will be presented in full productions at the James A. Little Theater in Santa Fe on the days spanning February 17 – 26, at 7:30 pm on Friday and Saturday; and 2:00 pm on Saturday and Sunday.

These new works are based on or inspired by the poetry and lives of four extraordinary, and very different poets: Denise Levertov, Lorine Niedecker, Anne Sexton and Amy Clampitt.

Here is some information on the playwrights and their subjects:

PSALMS of the CASTLE by Leslie Dillen

LESLIE DILLEN Ms. Dillen has appeared as an actor in theatre, television and film – in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston. Her plays have been produced in Massachusetts, New York, California and Washington; and were work-shopped at the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab and the Bay Area Playwrights festival. She has written and performed five one-person plays, including her award-winning ME & GEORGE, presented throughout the U.S. and at the Edinburgh Fringe; and ACTION JESUS, which was presented at the New York International Fringe festival. Five of Ms. Dillen’s ten-minute plays have been produced in the Boston Theater Marathon. Her most recent full-length play, TWO WIVES IN INDIA, has had development productions at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre and at the Santa fe Playhouse. Additional recent productions in Santa Fe include her ten-minute play STANDING HEAT in Benchwarmers, and her one-act play THE DEAL in Women’s Voices.

Ms. Dillen trained with Sanford Meisner at The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, and attended the American Conservatory Theatre under William Ball in San Francisco. She received her Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Boston University. She is a member of Dramatists Guild.

DENISE LEVERTOV The poet was born in Essex, England on October 24, 1923.She was educated at home, showing enthusiasm for writing from an early age. She studied ballet, art, piano and French as well as standard subjects. She was deeply influenced by Judaism as well as Christianity. When she moved to the United States she came under the influence of the Black Mountain Poets, especially the mysticism of Charles Olson.

She wrote and published twenty books of poetry, criticism and translations. Among her many awards and honors she received the Shelley Memorial Award, The Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She worked as poetry editor for The Nation and taught at Brandeis University , MIT and Tufts University.

She was married to American writer Mitchell Goodman. They had a son, Nikolai. She became an American citizen in 1955.

In 1997, Denise Levertov died at the age of 74 from complications due to lymphoma.

SWORN TO WATER by Dale Dunn

DALE DUNN Ms. Dunn has worked in New York as a dramaturg and assistant director for Joanne Akalitis at Mabou Mines, Theater for the New City and The Public Theater; and Julia Miles at the Women’s Project. Her early plays, NEWPLACE, VENUS RISING and an adaptation of Swift’s GULLIVER’S TRAVELS were produced Off-Broadway and at Columbia University where she received her MFA from the School of the Arts. In Los Angeles she worked in script development for Tri-Star, Disney and Paramount Studios and was foreign correspondent for Rizzoli’s Multi-national publication, Max Magazine.

Having recently moved to Santa Fe, Ms. Dunn returned to writing for the stage with BODY BURDEN, produced at the Adobe Theatre in Albuquerque and the Armory for the Arts Theater in Santa Fe. Her short works OUR PLACE, PARAKEET LOVE and OLD FAITHFUL have been produced at Fusion Theater, Warehouse 21and the Los Alamos Little Theatre. She also teaches workshops in writing for theatre at area high schools and volunteers her time at Wood Gormley Elementary School.

LORINE NIEDECKER Poet Lorine Niedecker was born on Black Hawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin on May 12, 1903, and lived most of her life in rural isolation. She grew up surrounded by the sights and sounds of the river until she moved to Fort Atkinson to attend school. This world of birds, trees, water and marsh was to inform her poetry for the rest of her life. On graduating from high school in 1922, she went to Beloit College to study literature, but left after two years to care for her ailing mother. She marries in 1928, but this lasted only two years.

Her work faltered for many years, but saw a renewed interest in the 1960s. Her books published in the last decades of her life, included My Friend Tree, T & G: The Collected Poems, 1936-1966, North Central and My Life By Water.

She had earned her living scrubbing hospital floors, “reading proof” at a local magazine and renting cottages. She had lived at the edge of poverty for years. Her marriage to Al Millen in 1963 brought financial stability back into her life. She died on December 31, 1970, leaving several unpublished typescripts. – many of which were burned at her request. Her comprehensive Collected Works were published in 2002, edited by Jenny Penberthy.

THE TIDE by Angela Janda

ANGELA JANDA Angela Janda’s work has appeared in journals including Whitefish Review, the New Mexico Poetry Review, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and polvo magazine. She was recipient of a 2006 New Mexico Discovery Award for poetry.

She grew up in rural Minnesota, graduating from Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. She has been a member of THEATERWORK’s Permanent Company for seven years, appearing in such productions as EMIL’S ENEMIES, OPHELIA, ANTIGONE, LEGACY OF LIGHT, BELLE MORAL,THE IMAGINARY INVALID, THE CLEAN HOUSE, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, THE TEMPEST, SCENES FROM AN EXECUTION, SOUND OF MUSIC and others.

AMY CLAMPITT Poet Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920 of Quaker parents, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. In the American Academy of Arts and Letters at nearby Grinnell College she began a study of English literature that eventually led her to poetry. She graduated from Grinnell and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. To support herself she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978.

At the age of sixty-three she published her first full-length collection The Kingfisher . In the decade that followed, Clampitt published five books of poetry, including What The Light Was Like, Archaic Figure and Westward. Her last book, A Silence Opens appeared in 1994. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and taught at the College of William and Mary, Smith College and Amherst College. She was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship. She died of cancer on September 10, 1994.

CONSORTING WITH ANGELS by Jenice Gharib

JENICE GHARIB Jenice Gharib has written essays, reviews, poetry, feature stories and plays. Her work has appeared in publications such as Vision Magazine, Not Enough Night and Sin Fronteras. Two of her short plays – SOME KISS WE WANT and THE DRESSING ROOM – have been produced. With THEATERWORK she appeared in and/or produced new work for AS KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE: A CELEBRATION OF THE POETRY OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS; SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON, a poetic response to Shakespeare’s THE TEMPEST; and OTHER ANTIGONES, a response to Jean Anouilh’s ANTIGONE. She is a member of the THEATERWORK Permanent Company.

ANNE SEXTON Ms. Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts on November 9, 1928. She spent most of her childhood in Boston. In 1945 she was enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school, Lowell, Massachusetts. For a time she modeled for Boston’s Hart Agency. On August 16, 1948, she married Alfred Sexton and they were together until 1973. She had two children – Linda Gray and Joyce Ladd.

Sexton suffered from severe mental illness for much of her life, her first manic episode taking place in 1955. She took up poetry at Glenside Hospital. Her poetry met early acclaim. A number were accepted by The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and The Saturday Review. In the late 1960’s the manic elements of her illness began to affect her work, though she still wrote and published work and gave readings. She also collaborated with musicians, forming a jazz-rock group called “Her Kind”. Her play, MERCY STREET was produced in1969, after years of revisions.

Within twelve years of writing her first sonnet, she was one of the most honored poets in America: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the first female member of the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with poet Maxine Kumin to revise Sexton’s manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975. On returning home she put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

7 pm Saturday, June 30, 2 pm Sunday, July 1

James A. Little Theater, Santa Fe, New Mexico

This production, the last of the 2011-2012 THEATERWOK Season, is the result of a yearlong story gathering project carried out in the Mora Valley by THEATERWORK and students of Mora High School.

Hundreds of stories were collected by students – stories which reveal hard work, resilience, generosity, great imagination, courage, a sense of hope, lively good humor, a sense of reverence … all emerging from the extraordinary landscape of the Mora Valley of New Mexico.

Since September, students went out as story collectors with questions like these:  “ What are we leaving behind ourselves? What is our particular set of gifts and hopes? Whose hands have built up this place? Whose hearts have held the memories we must not lose? What do people want the young people of the Valley to carry with them into their lives? What do they need from them?

On December3, 2011 the first production to come out of the project, ROOTS & WINGS: A Call for Stories was performed in the midst of a wild snowstorm to a packed gymnasium. That production featured the work of twenty young actors and musicians and involved members of the teaching staff at the high school at every level of preparation. Members of THEATERWORK’s design and technical team were all part of the production as well.

The characters in WHERE ANGELS COME TO SING! are storytellers, poets who have gathered in the Valley, drawn by the beauty, by the songs and voices of the people who live on its hillsides and along its streams. They also are pulled to the many abandoned farmhouses and chapels, slowly returning to the earth out of which they were made.  The storytellers, as the piece moves on, begin to disappear or be absorbed into the young people who portray them – you’ll see!

Please make time to see the work of the young people of the Mora Valley. They need to know that their artistry, insight, commitment and capacity for the beautiful are something the world wants – needs- from them.

Photo below by Sharon Stewart