Photo by Jordan Haiduk
Erica Keister, (left) playing Hermia, Trevor Whitsitt, Lysander, Audra Jenkins, as Helena practice Mid Summer Nights Dream at a dress rehersal at Peter Pan Park.
The Community Theatre of Emporia couldn’t have picked a more appropriate play for its adult cast to perform for this year’s Mid-Summer Fair.
CTE’s seventh annual extravaganza of games, activities, food and theater at Peter Pan Park, beginning Monday and running through Saturday, July 26, will feature the adults in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The children will perform “Where the Sidewalk Ends.”
The fair is free. Activities begin at 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and at 10 a.m. on Saturday. “Where the Sidewalk Ends” begins at 6 p.m. each night near the shelter south of the tennis courts, located close to Peter Pan’s new playground. That performance will be followed by “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the park’s amphitheater.
Tonya Starr, who’s directing “Midsummer Night’s Dream” along with Audra Jenkins, said she and Jenkins both love the Shakespeare comedy and also picked it because they both wanted to perform in the show.
“And CTE has a rule that you can’t direct and be in a show,” Starr said. “But, with ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ since you’ve got humans and fairies, you can very easily split it up and codirect, which is what Audra and I have done. She is acting as a human and directing the fairies, and I am acting as a fairy and directing the humans.”
Starr loves the fact that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” combines dramatic reality with fantasy.
“You’ve got reality in there with the humans, and the drama that’s going on between Lysander and Helena and Demetrius and Hermia,” she said, “and you’ve got the fantastical, the fairy world and all the drama that’s going on there between Titania and Oberon.
“And then you’ve got Puck, who just messes everything up in both worlds and makes it all really funny.”
“Where the Sidewalk Ends,” directed by Nancy Boyce, will feature the children reading and acting out selected works from Shel Silverstein’s 1974 poetry collection of the same name.
“It’s actually bringing the written work, the poem, bringing them to life,” Boyce said. “It’s not just a matter of just sitting there and watching them read. The goal is to animate the poem, and balancing that with just reading the poem. Some of the poems just lend themselves to be read.
“But we’re talking about children ages 5 and up that are doing this. And it’s really quite remarkable to watch children that are kindergarten age and up reading poetry and performing poetry.”
For the adult actors, Starr said, it’s been difficult to learn to project in the outdoor setting at Peter Pan, what with trains, helicopters, cicadas and other ambient noises. For the kids, Boyce said, that hasn’t been a big concern.
“Most children like to be loud and noisy anyway. ...” she said. “They spend a great deal of time being told to be quiet. And so, it’s really not so much a challenge to get them to be loud, but to allow them to know this is a place where it’s OK to be loud. ... And once they realize that it’s OK — nobody’s telling them to be quiet or sit still — when they know that it’s OK to be noisy, we don’t usually have much of a problem with it at all.”
In between plays, at about 7 p.m., the Lyon County Historical Society will offer a guided historical tour of Peter Pan Park featuring information about the park, Emporia and the family of William Allen White.
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Posted by Paccifier (anonymous) on July 17, 2008 at 3:45 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Great offerings available in Emporia between this and ESU Summer Theatre. Add in Live In The Lot and City Band, and it is a full week that we have available. Would be fun if the Historical Society could get a reinactor to portray WAW during the tour- sort of a walk with White.
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