Halina Newberry Grant, slipping a tight-bodiced black and purple dress over a hoop skirt and mesh petticoat before Monday’s rehearsal, summed up her multiple roles in the 11-actor play: “a milliner of questionable morals, a carny outsider, a psychic schoolteacher, an abused and murdered wife and a disfigured poetess.” It’s not the kind of thing you’re likely to find inscribed on the headstones of any of Green-Wood’s 560,000 permanent residents.įor the audience in the 150-odd seats set up under a natural proscenium of trees, the chance to soak up the spooky nocturnal atmosphere may be as much a draw as Masters’s bitterly ironic monologues, reshuffled and interwoven with period songs. Andolora’s production - reads like a mix of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” and Edward Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies,” with an extra bucket of bitters poured over the top. The opening poem, “The Hill” - a catalog of miserable life and often sudden death recited by the full cast in Mr. A cycle of 246 free-verse poems, “Spoon River Anthology” recounts the secret lives of the dead citizens of a fictional Illinois town, who speak from beyond the grave to confess their quiet desperation and secret defiance. It’s hard to think of a classic work of American literature less in need of a morbid makeover.
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