Program for Our Final Performances

I thought I would post the program from our final performances for anyone who wasn't able to attend. Thanks to everyone who was there!


Final Performances for Community Based Acting
April 25 and 26, 2009

Characters and Performers:
Gin Chance from The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek … Amy Steiger
Dray Chance from The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek … Amelia Pantalos
Pace Creagan from The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek … Will Gantt
Dalton Chance from The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek … Melanie Henry
Boxler from In the Heart of America … Rocky Vanderford
Fairouz Saboura from In the Heart of America … Zac Gilbert
Craver Perry from In the Heart of America … Cassie Perkins

The scenes we will perform today are from plays by Naomi Wallace, a Kentucky-born playwright whose new play The Hard Weather Boating Party opened this spring at Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays. In one of the plays the students chose, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, the character Pace Creagan says to her young friend, “Dalton Chance, when we're grown up, I want to stand here with you and not be afraid. I want to know it will be okay. Tonight. Tomorrow. That when it's time to work, I'll have work. That when I'm tired, I can rest. Just those things. Shouldn't they belong to us?" I find each part of Pace’s simple desire so moving - the "here" that means having a sense of place, the "with you" that means love and companionship, the lack of fear of persecution or loss, the need for satisfying work, and the need for rest - and this is so much what Ms. Wallace’s plays are about to me: the need to recognize which people in our world lack those simple human needs, to examine how we might contribute to their inability to have them, and to do our best to transform inequity and injustice in our own lives and communities.

And so these plays seemed ideal models for our efforts to find ways to examine and transform our relationship as theatre artists to our own community. All of us collected interviews with two or three people, and then we used pieces of those interviews in solo character study performances, using a technique borrowed from performance ethnography and the work of Anna Deavere Smith, who edits interviews into performances and speaks her interviewees’ words verbatim. We use her work because it gives equal attention to empathy and difference. Smith sees drama in the effort she makes to “cross the bridge” between herself and other people. In the introduction to her play Fires in the Mirror, she writes, "Character lives in the obvious gap between the real person and my attempt to seem like them. I try to close the gap between us, but I applaud the gap between us. I am willing to display my own unlikeness" (xxxvii-xxxviii). So as we worked, we noticed where we succeeded and failed in our attempts to get inside another person’s skin—and the important thing is what we learned through the process, through learning how to listen so closely to someone else, through becoming aware of how complicated human identity is, and the beauty and difficulty of that complexity, through finding out how to truly respect both the comforting similarities and the significant and fascinating differences between ourselves and other people.

Thanks for giving us your time and attention! We hope you enjoy the performances. We would love to hear your thoughts on our work or these characters and the questions they raise.