During Warren Hammack's 25 years of leadership as artistic director at Horse Cave Theatre, 17 world premieres were produced. This collection of 14 of those scripts is documentation of an exciting and prolific period in Kentucky's literary, artistic and theatrical history. Playwrights whose work appears in the book are Billy Edd Wheeler, Jim Wayne Miller, Sallie Bingham, Liz Bussey Fentress, Nancy Gall-Clayton, Betty Peterson, Jim Peyton, Larry Pike, Joe Terrence Gray, John Howell, Ron Meilech and Frank Schaefer. As co-editor Fentress notes in her afterword, Hammack knew from experience that doing shows in rotating repertory is what made the production of the Kentucky Voices world premieres possible. And associate director Pamela White, in her introduction to this volume, explains that "a script development process was initiated, which we called Kentucky Voices. It included an annual spring weekend of staged readings of from three to five original Kentucky plays. Over two densely-packed days, these previously unproduced scripts took flight before small but devoted audiences. In the years 1990 to 2001, the theatre staged 43 such readings." A play had but two requirements to be eligible for Kentucky Voices consideration: it had to be full length (no one-acts) and it had to be about Kentucky or written by a Kentuckian, or both. Hammack points out in his preface that not all of the settings of the plays collected in this book are specific to the state, but all are certainly connected by virtue of their authorship or subject matter. Most are of Kentucky because of their use of rich language, accents and characters. Hammack is quick to point out that these scripts would play well to audiences anywhere. Like all profound literary art - and theatre art in particular - these writers hold human truths in their hands, offering them to the reader who understands that this is how the specific works its universal magic: a good story well told can be from anywhere yet touch readers everywhere. These playwrights have accomplished that and more, capturing and preserving a moment in time from their chosen, changing corner of Kentucky. It's a valuable gift they have given us, Hammack says. This anthology, which includes commentary by each playwright and numerous images from those original productions, is monument to the spirit of the Kentucky Voices project during its lifetime at Horse Cave. The significance of this historic collection cannot be overstated. (Published Nov. 2009 by MotesBooks: www.MotesBooks.com)
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Read these plays!,
This review is from: World Premieres from Horse Cave: Plays by Kentucky Writers (Paperback)
This is a book to relish, a collection of plays whose characters will win your heart and stay in your mind. There's Mossie, the Appalachian mountain woman who describes herself as "dumb as a coal bucket. A empty one at that," matching her wits and gumption against strip miners in Mossie and the Strippers. There's Liz, practicing the organ in a dark and dusty dairy barn at the end of County Road ZZ in Liz's Circus Story. Bennie ("a short, roundish man, age forty-five"), with his cardboard boxes of memorabilia, organizing a reunion of his old junior varsity basketball team at their high school hangout, in Beating the Varsity. And Rebecca, in The Dancers of Canaan, haunted by the death of her child - her "Possum Baby" - and striving to become "an upstandin' Shaker lady." These characters speak out of lives rooted in real places; their truths call up our own.
You'll find characters from history too: Aaron Burr, using lawyerly skills, bending his story to fend off enemies in the newspapers and the courts as he plans his questionable expedition to Mexico; John Jacob Niles, collecting Appalachian ballads while he travels as an assistant to - and becomes involved in a delicate relationship with - the photographer Doris Ullman; and Mary Todd Lincoln, plaintively explaining her need for lace curtains "when I had not a single window to hang them." All of these stories, the imagined lives of people whose names we know and those whose names we don't, are rich with a feeling of lived history, moments of human experience caught and framed, for the stage - or to be read with enjoyment!
5.0 out of 5 stars
World Premieres from Horse Cave:Plays by Kentucky Writers,
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This review is from: World Premieres from Horse Cave: Plays by Kentucky Writers (Paperback)
I find most of the plays in this compilation to be refreshing mind stimulators, with sensitive imagery, and creative reinforcement that make me smile and cry because of their enveloping essence .
I am especially moved by the vivid, environs that oft times form and connect behavioral dependence between humans and other animals captured so well in "Liz's Circus Story". Each character portrayed could be my friend too. It is amazing that one person could immerse herself into the characters so thoroughly and express it so well. This is an excellent collection that I will not only read selections from again and again but also give as a gift.
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