I am proud to welcome you to NEYT's first fall 2008 production: William Luce's "The Belle of Amherst."
Every year, there are several outstanding actors and actresses within these walls who approach the end of their student time with us. They have worked hard, doing supporting roles and leads, taking classes, stage managing, toiling backstage, and counseling younger actors. We determine that they have earned their chance to do a capstone, a challenging thesis project.
It is now Shannon Ward's turn.
This is the fifth consecutive fall play for Shannon and me; she moved up from a fisherman with a few lines in "Playboy of the Western World," to the scorned Hero of Shakespeare's "Much Ado." She then played Helen Keller's mother in "Miracle Worker," and had us in stitches last year as Mrs. Claypool, the long-suffering female foil to Groucho Marx in "A Night at the Opera."
Now she gives us Emily Dickinson.
We owe much gratitude to William Luce for bringing to life a character whom most of us misunderstand. That is not our fault! Our high school poetry textbook included a few of her poems. We remember her for a sing-song hymn-like rhythm, for cute little verses about snakes and success and railroad trains. We learned a bit about her while devouring Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe and all those other powerful men. If we thought about her, it was to remember--but not to explore why--she was a near-hermit with a reputation as the quirky old maid of 1860's Amherst.
There is so much more to Emily Dickinson, and in two short hours in this theater, you will get her in a way you never did before--how she took the language of Puritanism and Protestant sermons and twisted it into novelty. How she struggled to forge her female identity in a household with a distant, silent mother and dominant, arbitrary father. How she nurtured her "little force" of poetry, keeping it strong and whole against all odds, against all expectations that could easily smother it--that she would turn out mentally or physically or socially normal, that she would marry, that she would accept her submissive role in a family, or in the patriarchal Fundamentalist revival that swept up nearly all the citizens of her town.
"The Belle of Amherst" is a triumphant story of a woman who never lost focus, an undisputed poetic pioneer. She created form and sensibility and subject matter that gave us Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and countless others. She survived loneliness, the loss of so many friends and family to tuberculosis, outright artistic rejection by editors she trusted, and lived happily and successfully in a self-created world of imagination, word play, extreme sexual fantasy, violence, labyrinthine logic, and constant artistic creativity that most of us can't even imagine.
Emily Dickinson is our strangest, greatest poet. And she is here today in our theater.
Every year, there are several outstanding actors and actresses within these walls who approach the end of their student time with us. They have worked hard, doing supporting roles and leads, taking classes, stage managing, toiling backstage, and counseling younger actors. We determine that they have earned their chance to do a capstone, a challenging thesis project.
It is now Shannon Ward's turn.
This is the fifth consecutive fall play for Shannon and me; she moved up from a fisherman with a few lines in "Playboy of the Western World," to the scorned Hero of Shakespeare's "Much Ado." She then played Helen Keller's mother in "Miracle Worker," and had us in stitches last year as Mrs. Claypool, the long-suffering female foil to Groucho Marx in "A Night at the Opera."
Now she gives us Emily Dickinson.
We owe much gratitude to William Luce for bringing to life a character whom most of us misunderstand. That is not our fault! Our high school poetry textbook included a few of her poems. We remember her for a sing-song hymn-like rhythm, for cute little verses about snakes and success and railroad trains. We learned a bit about her while devouring Walt Whitman and Edgar Allen Poe and all those other powerful men. If we thought about her, it was to remember--but not to explore why--she was a near-hermit with a reputation as the quirky old maid of 1860's Amherst.
There is so much more to Emily Dickinson, and in two short hours in this theater, you will get her in a way you never did before--how she took the language of Puritanism and Protestant sermons and twisted it into novelty. How she struggled to forge her female identity in a household with a distant, silent mother and dominant, arbitrary father. How she nurtured her "little force" of poetry, keeping it strong and whole against all odds, against all expectations that could easily smother it--that she would turn out mentally or physically or socially normal, that she would marry, that she would accept her submissive role in a family, or in the patriarchal Fundamentalist revival that swept up nearly all the citizens of her town.
"The Belle of Amherst" is a triumphant story of a woman who never lost focus, an undisputed poetic pioneer. She created form and sensibility and subject matter that gave us Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and countless others. She survived loneliness, the loss of so many friends and family to tuberculosis, outright artistic rejection by editors she trusted, and lived happily and successfully in a self-created world of imagination, word play, extreme sexual fantasy, violence, labyrinthine logic, and constant artistic creativity that most of us can't even imagine.
Emily Dickinson is our strangest, greatest poet. And she is here today in our theater.