Date: 11/20/2023
NORTHAMPTON — After a five-year hiatus, mainly due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the Play by Play festival is returning to Western Massachusetts at the A.P.E. Gallery in Northampton from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3.
Facilitated by the Northampton Playwrights Lab, which was founded by Meryl Cohn in 2005, the Play by Play festival is a four-day event featuring readings of six different plays created by six local professional playwrights from the lab.
According to Stephanie Carlson, an actor, singer and musical theater performer who wrote one of the plays for this festival, The Northampton Playwrights Lab is a tight-knit group of local professional playwrights that gather regularly to offer feedback to one another and encourage each other to reach the next level of their writing.
“This is a really close community of playwrights who work with each other and check in on each other regularly,” said Carlson, whose decades of experience in the performance arts industry has manifested in cofounding the Passport Theatre Company and participating in national and international tours as a singer, dancer and actor.
Since its inception 18 years ago, the Northampton Playwrights Lab has featured six to eight members. According to Peter Kennedy, a New England-based playwright and teacher, the group is an excellent cross-section of different personalities, strengths and ways of approaching playwriting.
“We’ve been together so long that we trust each other for constructive criticism,” said Kennedy, whose plays have been a part of numerous staged readings and productions in national festivals.
“What we’re doing for the Play by Play festival is basically what we do in our own living rooms or lately on Zoom, because of COVID and just other logistical reasons, where we present a work in progress and we get feedback on it and we take that feedback and then we bring back another version the next time that we’re presenting at our meetings,” he continued.
Carlson said that the Play by Play festival this year is consistent with past festivals in that it will showcase a range of works from the members of the lab. Some of the plays showcased have gone through many public readings and are on the verge of production, while others are being read for the first time.
“There’s as many different kinds of theater as there are different kinds of people, and it’s good to know that there’s something for all kinds of tastes and interests, and I think it’s fun to see that there’s a diversity of styles even in our small community,” Carlson said, when talking about the different works.
Kennedy’s play in particular — titled “Haunted Houses” — is inspired by events in 1978 where New Yorker journalist Zachary Noel was investigating reports of paranormal activity at The Sunflower, a small inn owned by the Crane family in the heart of the historic “burned-over district” of upstate New York.
The play’s synopsis describes a situation where a psychic named Madame Irene, who has ties with the nearby Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, is convinced that a poltergeist has attached itself to troubled teenager Rachel Crane. Disturbing incidents mount and a séance ensues.
Kennedy said the influence of the play came from his experience visiting the psychic community of Lily Dale in Western Massachusetts. The community is an enclave of psychics that live in a small town full of Victorian houses. According to Kennedy, they invite visitors every summer to have psychic readings in the woods and by appointment at their houses.
He said he was also generally fascinated with the history of spiritualism and how that fits into the history of Suffragist movement in upstate New York, which happens to be where he is from.
“Women back then, one of the only ways they could be taken seriously is that dead people were speaking through them, so they would use that opportunity as a mouthpiece for abolitionism and equal rights for women, and they were able to do that under the guise of ‘the spirit as talking for me,’” Kennedy said. “I thought it’d be interesting to explore that a little bit in the play.”
Carlson’s play, meanwhile, is titled “Hedges,” and is described as a 10-minute play about beloved pets, high hedges, and a little bit of Northampton history.
In an interview with Reminder Publishing, Carlson said this play was a new challenge for her because it was her first foray into shorthand, but it was a challenge she was happy to take on. She added that her play was inspired by a feature in the Daily Hampshire Gazette that sparked her interest in local history.
“This is the first read of this play, so I’m really excited to hear it in front of an audience for the first time and see how it resonates,” Carlson said.
For “Haunted Houses,” Kennedy said he wants to evoke dark humor, magical realism and suspense.
“I want people to kind of examine their own perceptions of the supernatural and see if they identify with any of the characters in the play and what their perceptions of the supernatural is,” he said.
Carlson, meanwhile, said her play tends to go for character-based with a slightly heightened reality and a comic edge.
“It’s got a heart and hopefully it will touch people on some levels, but essentially I’m also hoping that there will be some chuckles,” Carlson added.
According to Kennedy and Carlson, all the plays will mostly feature local professional actors. Kennedy, who teaches at Hilltown Charter School in Easthampton, even said that two of the five people participating in his play are former students of his, while a third person is someone he works with at the school. Other actors are drawn locally based on recommendations from the playwrights.
“There’s a very high level of professionalism,” Carlson said. “We’ve got so many talented people in the valley.”
When asked why it is so important to have this festival back in the community’s artistic fold, both Kennedy and Carlson expressed how valuable it is to have a vibrant theater community and credited the A.P.E. Gallery for being a place where it is easy to get hooked into what is going on inside.
“There’s something great about walking down Main Street and noticing theater going on,” Kennedy said. “I think just making theater an active, vibrant part of the downtown landscape is really important.”
Tickets are now available for the six plays and readers can learn more about the prices, schedule and themes of each play by visiting the ticketing website at theticketing.co/o/npl23.