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Smith
Senior Directs Provocative Drama
Sarah Jadin Smith ’08, Shaun
Hall and Caitlin Bliss Smith ’08 (left to right) in a
scene
from A
Bright Room Called Day(photo by Jon Crispin). |
The
Smith College Department of Theatre opens its spring season
with Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony
Kushner’s
provocative 1991 drama A Bright
Room Called Day, directed by Simone Gianfrancesco ’08.
A Bright Room Called Day runs
Thursday through Saturday, February 28-March 1, and Wednesday
through Saturday, March 5-8, at 8 p.m. each day in the Hallie
Flanagan Theatre, Mendenhall Center. Tickets are $8 for the
general public and $5 for students and seniors. Wednesday,
March 5, is dollar night for Smith students.
The
play follows a group of left-leaning artists and political
activists struggling to preserve themselves in 1930s Berlin
as the Weimar Republic is collapsing and Hitler's Nazi-led
party is rising to power. Juxtaposed over this world on
the brink of catastrophe is the world of an angry young
woman from the 1980s whose tirades equating Reagan’s America
with Hitler’s Germany interrupt the conventional drama
of the German friends. While the central character from the
1930s world wrestles with the moral dilemma of choosing between
self and community, comfort and conscience, action and reaction,
the central character from the 1980s challenges an American
audience to ask itself how far it will follow its government—whatever
it asks, whatever the consequences. Hailed as “Brash,
audacious and...intoxicatingly visionary” by Sid Smith
of the Chicago Tribune, A Bright Room Called
Day challenges and calls into question its audience’s
political and moral conscience.
When asked what drew her to Bright Room,
Gianfrancesco pointed to the avant-garde nature of the
piece, which calls for the use of slide projections and
includes a rich mixture of worlds, time periods, and historical-political
and humanitarian themes, ripe for experimentation. The
set, designed by Bethany McComis ’09, will include
the use of four separate projection screens that will show
text, image and some video as a complement to the action
on stage.
Gianfrancesco
is a theatre/English double major from Rhode Island. An
actor and director throughout high school, her directing
credits at Smith include an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Wild Duck and a play reading of Commedia
Dell'Smartass, by Sonya Sobieski ‘91. Also at
Smith, Simone has acted in the Smith production of Sophie
Treadwell’s Machinal and has stage-managed
both Kushner’s adaptation of Cornielle's The Illusion and
the world premiere of Paul Zimet and Ellen Maddow’s Flip
Side. After Smith, Simone hopes to gain a Fulbright
to study theatre in Europe before applying to graduate school.
Playwright Tony Kushner won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Angels
in America and an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay
for Munich (2005). He has also been the recipient
of numerous awards including an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards,
Evening Standard Award, OBIE, New York Drama Critics Circle
Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Whiting
Writers Fellowship, Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship,
National Foundation of Jewish Culture, Cultural Achievement
award, Honorary Doctor of Letters from Pace University on
May 25, 2004, and Honorary Degree from Brandeis University
on May 21, 2006.
Purchase tickets in advance by calling the Mendenhall Center
box office, 413-585-2787 (ARTS), in person Monday through
Friday between 1 and 4 p.m. at the box office, or at the
door beginning one hour before show time. |
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