The Grange Theater at Artistree in South Pomfret will host three short plays this weekend, all written by playwrights with connections to the area. The plays range from science fiction to dramedy to the historical, and showcase the talents of the playwrights whose work will be brought to life through staged readings by professional actors at the intimate, 75-seat Grange Theatre.
‘The Vastness Within’
The weekend kicks off Friday night with the play “The Vastness Within,” written by Daniel Patterson of Hartland. The play opens with the mysterious image of a dead man on the moon. After humans from Earth realize he does not come from their planet, they investigate this seeming scientific impossibility, leading them to age-old questions and debates around science and religion.
‘Discord in Concord’
The second staged play of the weekend, “Discord in Concord” — written by Woodstock fixture and current part-time resident Peter Rousmaniere — kicks off Saturday’s two-play schedule with a 3 p.m. matinee. The play was first staged in Vermont in September of this year at the North Universalist Chapel Society in Woodstock, where Rousmaniere and Judith Taylor breathed life into the historical characters of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, as the canonical thinkers debated the best course of action during an American crisis of democracy.
The reprise of that performance will see professional actors cast in the roles of Emerson and Fuller, as well as a revised script. “The revisions did two things,” Rousmaniere told the Standard. “One [was] to make the tension between Emerson and Fuller clearer, and then to set it up for an audience discussion. The audience discussion is the center of the activity.”
‘Shrimp Pudding’
The final play of the weekend event is Kyle Mumford’s “Shrimp Pudding,” which will be performed Saturday night at 7 p.m. Though Mumford currently resides in Brooklyn, N.Y., he has childhood roots in Barnard. Mumford’s play centers around the chance collision of a caterer and would-be bride at her wedding — a world familiar to someone who grew up in the restaurant biz, as did Mumford, whose parents were chefs at a restaurant they owned. “As a kid, I constantly would see a hustle, a lot of characters coming in and out of the restaurant — single moms, immigrants, people with checkered pasts — trying to do right. I slowly but surely started keeping a Rolodex, if you will, of characters in my brain, and thus creating stories.” Those lives caused Mumford to reflect back on himself as an adult. “Also with me as a human,” he said, “I find myself in very awkward situations, which led to developing the story of ‘Shrimp Pudding.’”
For more on this, please see our Nov. 20 edition of the Vermont Standard.
