Contact: David Kuehn, Executive Director s2

For Immediate Release: Contact: David Kuehn, Executive Director Cotuit Center for the Arts Phone: (508) 428-0669 Email: [email protected] Website: ArtsOnTheCape.org

“Woods Hole Plays” at Cotuit Center for the Arts June 5 to 29 Cotuit Center for the Arts presents “The Woods Hole Plays,” two new one-act plays, June 5 to 29 in the Black Box Theater. The plays, “The Caretaker,” by Bronwen Prosser of Woods Hole, and “Church,” by Danny Mitarotondo of New York, are directed by Kathryn Walsh of Chicago. Performances are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8 PM and Sunday at 4 PM.

Earlier drafts of the plays were presented at CCftA and in Woods Hole in April as staged readings. Since then, the playwrights have revised the plays, which will now be presented as full productions with costumes, lighting and sound.

While the two plays are very different, both were written specifically for the Black Box Theater, said Prosser, and the action in each play takes place in Woods Hole. The same actors appear in both plays: Anna Botsford, Ricky Bourgeois, and Eric Edwards.

“The Caretaker,” which takes place in the winter, is about a relationship between the caretaker of an estate and the family who employs him. As the play begins, Prosser explains, “one of the daughters of the owner of the estate shows up unannounced, uninvited, and unwanted by the caretaker.”

“I am really interested in summer-winter people relationships,” said Prosser, “and in how we all deal with them. The idea of this play is to explore those relationships. When we did the Woods Hole reading, there were caretakers in the audience who were interested and excited that someone was writing about that reality. The Cotuit audience was also intrigued. It’s something that people on the Cape can relate to.”

Mitarotondo describes “Church” as a “midsummer night’s dreamesque wedding at hyper-speed,” a farce-comedy in which feisty, aggressive Anna marries the more conservative Ricky after a two-day whirlwind romance. Anna’s father is a minister, “a wise and haunted man,” and so they get married in his church.

Both playwrights are very pleased with the workshopping process.

“At the first reading at Cotuit, I didn’t have an ending,” said Prosser. “Danny had 11 pages, but we had a great talk-back with the audience, led by Kathryn, our director. It’s a wonderful exchange to share work in progress with an audience. It’s a necessary step in the development of any play.” “We went home and rewrote all day Thursday, had a rehearsal Thursday night, then rewrote all day Friday, and had a rehearsal Friday night,” said Mitarotondo. “By Saturday, when we performed it again in Woods Hole, Bronwen had an ending, I had written about 50 pages, and my play had changed drastically.”

The talk-backs have provided some of the motivation for changes in the scripts. For Mitarotondo, the process is more about hearing the actors speak his words, “hearing the flow of the play, the music of the play, where things land, not necessarily in terms of audience reaction, but in terms of story.”

For both, the Black Box setting figures strongly. “I deal with the claustrophobia of the space, the closed-offness, the smallness, the feeling of being confined during the winter,” said Prosser.

In contrast, Mitarotondo uses the whole house in which the theater is located for “Church.” “Characters are going up and down the stairs, coming in and out of the room and using the kitchen,” he said. “Conversations are happening upstairs, downstairs, and overlapping each other, the way conversations happen in real life.”

To track his conversations, Mitarotondo has developed a score format for writing his scripts, much like an orchestral score, “with staffs for each actor, for the space, and for the lights and other events, so that I can really zoom in on what is happening everywhere,” he said.

Mitarotondo also likes to select his actors before he starts writing a script because of the inspiration they provide. He knew as soon as he saw the Black Box Theater that he wanted to write a play about a church. “The stairway reminded me of my Sunday school, for some reason,” he said.

“When I found out Eric Edwards is a Quaker minister, my first impulse was to write a serious investigation about God,” said Mitarotondo. “But somehow, this ridiculous farce came out instead. I don’t know where it came from.”

“The actors are working hard,” said Prosser. “They have two very different plays to perform in the same evening and are memorizing two entirely different scripts, forming very different relationships with each other in each play. From an actor’s point of view, it is a tremendous amount of work, and a tremendous amount of fun.

“And, for the audience, it’s two plays for the price of one!” she said.

Mitarotondo and Prosser met in 2006 at the Atlantic Theater Acting School in New York. They subsequently were founding members of the same theater company. Among the plays they produced was Prosser’s “The Make-Out Queen,” a one-woman show that was developed and produced in New York and that Prosser has presented both in Woods Hole and at Cotuit. Prosser has appeared in several other shows since then and has written several other new plays. Her play “Face East” is being presented at four different theaters across the Cape this year as part of the Four Squared collaborative theater project.

Mitarotondo is a playwright whose productions have been performed in New York, Los Angeles, Durango, Colorado, and Sibiu, Romania. He also teaches the Score Technique method of playwriting. He has also taught playwriting from the university level to pre-teen aspiring artists.

Kathryn Walsh is a member of the Two Pence Theatre Company in Chicago and has directed and assisted at many Chicago venues.

Tickets are $15, $12 for members. Cotuit Center for the Arts is at 4404 Route 28 in Cotuit. For more information, visit artsonthecape.org or call 508-428-0669.

What: The Woods Hole Plays: “The Caretaker” by Bronwen Prosser and “Church” by Danny Mitarotondo, directed by Kathryn Walsh

Where: Cotuit Center for the Arts, 4404 Route 28, Cotuit

When: June 5 to 29, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, 8 PM; Sunday, 4 PM

Admission: $15, $12 for members END