The Mad River
Valley's Community Theater
Waitsfield, Vermont
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The Playwright
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The Play In this thought provoking play, "Small Talk", the innocence of youth and the wisdom of age find common ground as they explore the questions which dominate their lives. Illness and the inevitable passing of loved ones make the need to understand seem time-driven and therefore the losses even more poignant. Set in the library-study of the family home, a precocious granddaughter and tenacious grandfather share their concerns and views of parenting, religion, hypocrisy and love with spiritual guidance from Mimi, the insightful grandmother who only offers advice from behind the scenes. |
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The Playwright
Eben Reilly gratefully acknowledges her publisher, Trevor Lockwood of Braiswick, not only for publishing her YA novels, Daughter Dedannan and Wolf, but for his almost daily encouragement to keep writing. She also thanks Ben Ressler for his imaginative contribution to those novels, Teddy and Moriah for critiquing all her work, and Robert Ressler for showing her that in the Arts tenacity pays. |
The Play "Return to West Raven" takes place in a southern Vermont town where Adam Pierce, up from NYC for the summer, encounters his Gulf War dad's ghost among the wrecked cars and vans that litter his uncle’s back acres. Sapped by the lethargy and sickness of Gulf War Syndrome, and driven to despair by the government's refusal to acknowledge his disease, Richard Pierce had driven his VW Rabbit under the wheels of an oncoming tractor trailer truck when his son was only five-- a fatal accident that only now Adam understands was no accident, only now can the two face head on in an attempt to restore their wrecked lives. |
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The Playwright
She has performed at Olney Theatre, Totem Pole Theatre, Harvard Summer Theatre, Poet’s Theatre, Tufts Arena Theater, Provincetown Playhouse, Irish Bronx Theatre Co., and the Irish Arts Center , NYC. Clare’s adaptation of John B. Keane’s Christmas Stories was performed by The Irish Bronx Theatre Co. Her short pieces have won awards at Lamia Ink!, and her one act play, Looking for Nadia, was a finalist in the 2005 Henrico Competition (Virginia). Looking for Nadia, was given a staged reading by the Schoodic Arts Festival (Maine ). She is currently a member of Charles Maryan’s Playwrights’/Directors’ Workshop in NYC. Clare did a playwriting residency with E.S.T., Lexington Center for the Arts, and was a member of Curt Dempster’s Playwriting Lab at E.S.T. in New York City. She is currently a member of Charles Maryan’s Playwrights’/ Directors’ Workshop in NYC. A short play, Sunday Sonata, was presented in an evening of short plays from the Maryan Workshop, at the Neighborhood Playhouse and is scheduled to be performed by American Irish Repertory Ensemble in Portland , Maine in January. Another short play, A Turn for the Worse, was performed at Baruch Performing Arts Center as part of a benefit evening for Animal Haven in New York City . A member of The Dramatists Guild, Clare has written three full-length plays, a one act play, and several shorter pieces. Two new full-length plays are currently in development in the Maryan workshop. Clare lives in Downeast Maine with her husband, poet and publisher Harry Smith, two cats, and two dogs. |
The Play The plot of "The Writing Room" is constructed in the form of a Celtic loop, a four-petaled design typical in Irish decorative arts: each of the four main characters is involved with all of the others, in an intricate and individual way. At the center of the pattern are the central issues of the play: loyalty vs. betrayal, and self-realization vs. self-destruction. Two writers (Larry and Joe), chums since graduate school, have a monthly roundtable to discuss their current projects. When Larry invites Mitch, who is largely unsuccessful, to join the circle, the relationships are thrown off balance. Mitch learns that Joe enjoys world-wide renown under a pseudonym. The news renders Mitch catatonic, devoured by jealousy, to the extent that his marriage to Annie is in jeopardy. Larry, who has always been in love with Annie, participates in rehabilitating Mitch, although not with the purest motives. Annie is torn between loyalty and self-preservation, with the welfare of her child complicating the mix. Joe also turns out to be helpful to Mitch, thereby displacing Larry as Mitch’s advisor. Just as Mitch pulls himself together and seems to have some real chance at success, Joe complicates matters by offering Mitch work and by becoming personally closer, perhaps too close. (…or is it only Mitch’s imagination?) Mitch’s relationship with Annie disintegrates further due to an ironic misunderstanding, and Mitch winds up living with Joe, also perhaps not with the purest motives. Larry finishes as odd-man-out in this theatrical game of Musical Chairs. |
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The Playwright
Her most produced
play is Below the Waist, a one-act farce concerning a vampire who
consults a psychiatrist about his foot fetish. It has been produced by colleges and high schools all over the
country and in Europe. Campbell lives in
Burlington, VT with her partner, Rick, and his and her children.
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The Play I first stumbled on
the story of Mrs. Rebecca Peake in the mid-1990’s during a casual
perusal of The History of Chelsea
(VT). In 1832, I read, she was convicted of murdering her 32 year-old stepson, Ephraim,
and was sentenced to hang; however, on the night before her
execution she managed to take an overdose of opium and the crowd of ten
thousand was…”spared the sight of seeing a woman hanged.” Although Chelsea
Courthouse burned down a few years later, someone saw to it that her
trial was published. I found
a copy at the Vermont Historical Library and began the research that
would take me many years and lead me to write four plays about this
woman. The first play, The
Trial of Mrs. Rebecca Peake, is a courtroom drama that details the
witch hunt and conspiracy around her arrest and conviction. However, Mrs. Peake
did not testify at her own trial and I was faithful to that in the play.
I always felt, though, that she needed to tell her story and
almost ten years later – and closer to two hundred years later for
Rebecca – I believe I have let her speak as well as I can. The play begins in South Randolph, VT in 1850. Rebecca is, of course, dead, but she haunts the house that was formerly hers and is now occupied by Dr. William Pember, the son of her own doctor and the doctor that attended her stepson, Ephraim Peake. Into this house comes the young doctor’s bride, Fiona, daughter of William’s medical professor. William has met Fiona while on a trip to Boston to visit the elder widower. He returns to Vermont, ponders a bit, and returns to Boston to ask for Fiona’s hand in marriage. In the interim, the doctor has passed away leaving nineteen year old Fiona orphaned. William marries her and brings her to his home. Fiona believes her
mother died when she was born. What
she can’t know, and what her husband discovers when he is summoned
back to Boston by Fiona’s family solicitor, is that her mother is very
much alive, but has been in a private asylum since Fiona’s infant
brother accidentally drowned. Fiona’s
father’s estate is insolvent, however, and William must decide whether
he can raise the money to keep his mother-in-law in a relatively
comfortably environment, or allow her to be turned over to the state
system of Massachusetts. And
whether to tell the wife he barely knows. Rebecca, meanwhile,
relives the trial, not only the court trial, but the trial that was her
life, beginning with her childhood. Her influence is felt in the house in many ways, though, and what
is she putting in the cups of water, and why is William’s brother,
Clayton, becoming deathly ill? Scrappy little Helen, sheltered innocent Fiona, and the accused and abandoned Rebecca: Self Evidence is about the sudden explosion that occurs when their lives entwine, and how dependent their fates become on each other. |
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The Playwright
Heidi is a screenwriter
and novelist as well as a new playwright. Her most recent accolades include acceptance into the 2004 Bread
Loaf Writer’s Conference for her novel-in-progress, Frog. She has also been a semi-finalist in a number of international
screenwriting competitions over the past year and has had her poetry
published by SPS Studios. Crosswords is Heidi’s first stage
play. |
The Play “Crosswords” is the
humorous story of Lester and Marie, a lonely retired couple, stagnating
from boredom. Their adult son and daughter decide not to come for
Christmas. Crushed and disgruntled by their children’s disinterest in
them, the couple decides things need to change. With the aid of National
Geographic and props they take exotic, unaffordable trips and adventures
in their own living room. The
audience cheers them on and things begin to change when their children
step in to surprise them with a classic twist on the story. |
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The Playwright Author, John Callahan, a native Philadelphian whose family was involved in theatrical organizations for years, is a graduate of Dartmouth and an alumnus of the Yale School of Drama. Not yet fully retired from a career in the organization and development of charitably supported organizations, he has served in senior administrative positions with the University of Chicago, Amherst College, Winterthur Museum and Gardens and the American Philosophical Society. Currently he is President of Carpenter, Shepherd and Warden, an institutional consulting firm. Married for nearly forty-four years to his high school sweetheart, Virginia, they live in New London , New Hampshire , and seasonally in Martha’s Vineyard , where by his own account he “hikes frequently, plays tennis badly, writes daily and takes on entirely too many volunteer activities.” In addition to acting in, directing and producing a number of plays in college and community theaters over the years, he has written several plays But only recently has he begun to do so in earnest. “In My Wildest Dreams” is both the first fruit of this new effort and the outgrowth of a succession of events of which he has first hand knowledge. His next play, “A Clear Blue Sky” has just been completed and is now in the final editing process. |
The Play “In My Wildest Dreams” takes place in a small New England town. Recently retired after thirty years of service to St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Ashton, Massachusetts, the Rector and his wife of many years confront their new lives with alternating dread and elation. They buy a home within the same town and busy themselves with volunteer activities, plans for travel and time to be spent with friends and family. But a hammer blow falls when he learns that he has been accused of serious impropriety. At first he does not know specifically what he is accused of, or by whom and under what circumstances. But gradually the story unfolds in the Bishop’s telling. Three women, two of whom are clergy and one of whom is a Senior Vestry Member, have accused him of sexual harassment, a charge that is at first vague but grows more clear as each person tells her own story with allegations differing in each case. Reputedly the result of actions over a fifteen-year period, the charges explode across the lives of all who are touched by them. They are by turns dramatic, poignant, humorous, sad, tender, cutting and absurd; the mystery is in whether or not these charges are true, and if true, by what standard and to what degree. |
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The Playwright
As well as being a playwright, Ms Roisman was also an essayist whose work has been heard on New Hampshire Public Radio. Her award-winning plays, which have been seen nationwide and in Canada, include "Nobody's Gilgul," "Scenes from a Seder," and "Changing Room." "Nobody's Gilgul" may be found in the anthology, "Making a Scene" and is taught in courses on Jewish drama. Born in Texas, Roisman lived for many years in Washington before moving to New Hampshire in 1995. She was the founding executive director of Jewish Funds for Justice, a group that sought to expand Jewish philanthropy beyond its traditional concerns. One of its first grants was to a young Chicago activist named Barack Obama. At the time of her death, Roisman was a research associate at the Brandeis Women's Institute at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., and was completing a series of poems she described as a personal dialogue with the tales of the Chasidim. |
The Play "The Linden Tree" takes place in the 1940’s during the German occupation of The Netherlands. In the midst of this, Letta, a young student, risks herself repeatedly to relocate Jewish babies whose parents have been sent to Westerbork. She is asked to care for two Jewish children and hide their father, Franz, from the Nazis. Unaware of the German plans for Dutch Jewry, they all believe that the war and the danger will end soon and they can then pick up the lives they left behind. But as the war drags on, Letta and Franz develop a love for one another that grows deeper as they confront the obstacles and dangers of war together. He has awakened in her a mature woman and she has offered him a love he has not experienced in his marriage. This bond sustains them as they endure Nazi searches, the death of loved ones and tests of their will to survive. In a desperate act, Letta kills a Nazi who is about to discover Franz’s hiding place. Franz and Letta determine to make a life together when the war is over. On St. Nicholas Eve of 1944, when their resources and energies are close to depleted, they discover that the Nazis have destroyed most of the Jews of Holland, and that Franz’s little family will be one of the few remaining intact Jewish families in the country. Franz refuses to accept this information, understanding its implications for his future with Letta. She is forced to decide whether to follow her heart and in so doing destroy one of these families, or to go her own way and let Franz and his wife rebuild the fragile Jewish community that she has risked her young life to preserve. Through her struggle, we are asked to contemplate the complex nature of goodness and the forces that drive it. The play was inspired by incidents in the life of Marion Pritchard, a rescuer of Jewish children during WWII and a resident of Vershire, Vermont. Judges found this
story “powerful and moving” with “excellent character development,
tight dialogue and highly original presentation” of a difficult and
dangerous time. |
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"Chasin'
Night Birds" |
1999 Award Winner “The Touch” |
1997 Award Winner “Put on Your Dresses
of Red and Gold” |
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1995 Shared Award “Small Stakes” is
revised & now called “Box Set” and “Dear Charles” |
1994 “Loving Lives” |
1993 “The Legend of Pine
Valley”
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1992 “Cherry Coke” |
1991 “Twigs” by George Furth |
1990 “Better” by Gloria Howell |
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1989 “Horse Trough
Trouble” |
1988 “Holy Matrimony” |
1987 “Hard News” |
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1986 Temple Haunting Martlet by |
1985 “Sandwalk” |
1984 “And Still is Love” by Harry Granick |
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1983 “Out of Sight, Out of
Murder” |
Eben
Reilly (pictured here with her three children) lives in a nether world of fiction and drama playing out in her
head as she shuttles between her home in Castleton, Vermont and her
livelihood in
Bitten by the theatre bug at age 9 (Dormouse,
Alice in Wonderland),
Clare played the great roles at Boston
Maura Campbell has
been writing, directing and producing plays ever since her premature
mid-life crisis eleven years ago. Since
then she has written more than thirty plays, taught high school and
middle school drama, college screenwriting, and is looking forward to
being the drama director at Gailer School in Shelburne, Vermont this
fall.
We
are saddened to learn that Lois Roisman, playwright, poet and philanthropist
died of congestive heart failure on June 2 2008.