Linda McInerney

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by Bonnie Wells
Staff Writer
Published on July 04, 2008

Collapsing the world into black and white can make it seem more manageable. But reality comes in shades of gray. And certainty has let us down of late – the words “WMD,” “slam dunk” and “You can just refinance when the adjustment comes due” come to mind.
“In days gone by, doubt was the province of the wise,” said playwright John Patrick Shanley in a 2005 interview with Jeffrey Brown on PBS’ “News Hour.” The occasion was the announcement that Shanley’s play “Doubt” had won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
“Now it’s perceived to be a sign of weakness,” Shanley went on. “You’re supposed to fire back your answer irrespective of what the other person is saying, and prevail. And I’d like to see a more spacious conversation.”
Shanley invites audiences into just such a spacious conversation in “Doubt,” in which the certainty of an old-school nun that a young priest has behaved improperly with a student plays out against an ambiguous landscape of events. In addition to the Pulitzer, the play won four 2005 Tony Awards, including Best Play, as well as the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play of the season.
“It’s the best-crafted play I’ve seen in the modern canon for eight to 10 years,” said Linda McInerney, whose Old Deerfield Productions opens a two-week run of the drama July 10 at Reid Theater at Deerfield Academy.
“It’s like a thriller, but with deep ideas and multiple emotions flying around all at once,” she said. “There’s also a lightness and humor to it. It touches all your senses.”
McInerney directs the production, which features Maureen McElligott as the adamantine Sister Aloysius; Andrew Lichtenberg as the priest, Father Flynn; Marissa Sicley as a young teacher, Sister James; and Heather A. Lord as Mrs. Muller, the mother of the student at the heart of Sister Aloysius’ suspicions.
Old Deerfield Productions has been synonomous with quality historical drama since 1989, when, under the aegis of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, the company began staging a production each summer in Deerfield. Recently the theatrical venture has assumed independent status and broadened its mission to include contemporary works and a lively year-round schedule. The company’s original opera “The Captivation of Eunice Williams” by Paula Kimper and Harley Erdman, which premiered in 2004 in Deerfield and has since toured the East Coast and Canada, will open next month in Skopje, Macedonia, before touring the Balkans over the summer.
The musical “Still Life With Toe Shoes” by award-winning local composer Marisa Michelson will follow “Doubt” on the Reid Theater stage this summer, and other productions are in the works. But the company’s aim remains the same, McInerney said – from the Web site: “to create, nourish, promote, produce and present high quality theatre art that challenges, entertains, heals, engages and nurtures our audience.”
McInerney said “Doubt” made the schedule not only for its excellence, but because, like many communities, Western Massachusetts has had intimate and painful experience with the Catholic Church’s pedophile-priest tragedy.
“I wanted to offer this play as a forum for discussion and healing,” she said. “In a place that has been so harmed by the issue, the play allows us to come together in healing. We get to build community and connection, sitting in the dark together and going through this.”
After each show, the audience is invited to linger for a panel discussion with the cast and representatives of the church, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and the legal community.
Still, the play is “not only about the gray areas in the church scandal, but the gray areas in life,” McInerney said. “Shanley is reall y about doing the deep personal analysis of the complexities of life, and to wrestle with doubt. In a statement she quotes him:
“There are two predominate ways of dealing in this country. There is the culture of doubt, and there is the culture of dogma. Both are remedies to the problem of choice.”
He said the articulation of some of the most pressing issues of the day – reproductive rights, the war in Iraq – are actually dogma framed as choice, and he offers a suggestion:
“Don’t fall for it. Responsible, thinking people do not lead a yes-or-no existence. Responsible, thinking people do not have to reduce complicated subjects down to ‘for’ or ‘against.’ “
Old Deerfield Productions presents “Doubt” July 10-12 and 17-19 at 8 p.m. with matinees July 13 and 20 at 2 p.m. at Reid Theatre at Deerfield Academy. Tickets are $20; $15 for students and seniors, available at The Northampton Box Office at www.nbotickets.com or by calling 586-8686; or at the Reid Theatre Box Office on the nights of the show.

Linda McInerney of Old Deerfield Productions, Deerfield, MA USA attended the International Theatre Festival, “ SKUPI – FEST “, November, 2007, and presented a paper on the Mohawk ceremonies that have been interpreted in The Captivation of Eunice Williams. The Captivation of Eunice Williams has been chosen to be a production at the Albanian National Theatre and will tour throughout the Balkans in the summer of 2008. The production is a collaboration with the Albanian National Theatre Company, the Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra, the International Music and Art Foundation and Old Deerfield Productions.
To read the paper on Mohawk traditions in the opera: Mohawk Paper

For Immediate Release
Contact: Linda McInerney
lmciner@aol.com
413.774.4527

WORKING TOGETHER TO BRING THE PERFORMING ARTS
TO THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC
THE COMEDY, DON JUAN BY MOLIERE ON DECEMBER 1 at 8:00 PM

A group of local performing arts groups including a ballet company, a theatre troupe and an opera company are all working together to fill the Academy of Music with vibrant performing arts this season. “There’s so much going on this season that it’s been a real challenge to fit us all in. With THE NUTCRACKER, RIGOLETTO, and DON JUAN happening almost at once there have been all kinds of overlapping needs. It has forced us into a kind of co-operation that you’d only expect from a marriage. But it is working. And it’s been terrific to collaborate in new ways. We all have known each other for years, twenty years in some cases if I think about my friend at the Pioneer Valley Ballet, Dan Rist. It is thrilling to finally be working together to fill this beautiful theatre with living, breathing art,” said Linda McInerney, Artistic Director of Old Deerfield Productions whose production of DON JUAN by Molière comes to the Academy of Music on December 1 at 8:00 PM. “If it weren’t for the amazing team at the Academy this wouldn’t have been possible. They have bent over backwards to be sure that we can all have our scheduling needs met and that is no mean feat,” she added.

This flurry of activity is just what the board of trustees of the Academy of Music had in mind when they announced their new strategy at the Gala for the Academy of Music at the Hotel Northampton on September 6. The idea is to create a guild of local performing arts groups to bring their work and audiences to the Academy so that the focus of the venue becomes about the performing arts again. Said McInerney, “When you walk into that theatre and feel the history and resonance of the great performers who have sung, spoken and danced on that stage you know that it’s a place for live performance. I am so happy to be a part of the movement to bring that back. And DON JUAN will be the perfect show for the Academy. I hope that people will come to enjoy it. I don’t have a track record in Northampton, but my Deerfield audience loved it. It got great reviews. Chris Rohmann, who is very discerning, gave us a real rave.” Indeed, Rohmann, who is the theatre critic for WFCR and the Valley Advocate had this to say about the production, “This excellent staging of Molière’s comic investigation of deceit, lust and hypocrisy is deliciously irreverent, delightfully relevant and deliriously funny. The new translation by Virginia Scott is graceful, authentic and eminently playable.”
This new production of Molière’s comedy DON JUAN is translated by Virginia Scott and produced and directed by Linda McInerney. Virginia Scott is Professor Emerita of Theater, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has translated a number of Molière’s prose plays including THE MISANTHROPE and THE MISER published by Broadway Play Publishing. Her biography of the playwright, Molière: A Theatrical Life, has been praised by the Economist, Library Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and to quote the Washington Post is, “...eminently readable… scholarly without lapsing into jargon, witty without straining to be clever, flavorously personal but never self-indulgent.” Said McInerney, “DON JUAN is not often produced because it is controversial, has a wildly dark sense of humor, and a shocking ending. It is a great honor to be directing Virginia’s translation of the play as it really embraces the humor and theatricality of the piece. So often when you do a classic play in translation it’s hard to find the theatrical teeth of it. In this translation, Molière’s theatrical genius shines through. The comic bits are right there. The humor plays beautifully. And the political hit of the play just crackles. I was attracted to the play because it doesn’t just deal with Don Juan’s promiscuity, although it is always fun to do a play that is filled with sexuality. But for him that is one step in his escalating hubris – it gets really interesting when he takes on other social structures like family and God. I think his speech about hypocrisy is one of the most prescient things I’ve heard in years. I can feel the collective audience gasp every time I hear it. There are some folks in Washington might want to give it a listen.”

Don Juan, the “Seducer of Seville,” originated as a hero-villain of Spanish folk legend, is a famous lover and scoundrel who has made more than a thousand sexual conquests. Witty, urbane, and poetic in its prose, DON JUAN is, most importantly, as funny now as it was for audiences when it was first presented. Scott’s new translation captures the comedy, dark wit, and brilliant theatricality of the original. Kate Thaw is the costume designer and the visual inspiration for the piece comes from the Baroque painter, Carravagio whose rich colors, dramatic lighting, which Paul Yager will be interpreting, and dramatic subjects are akin to the flavor of the play. The cast includes: Steve Eldrege as Don Juan with Marina Goldman, Bill Stewart, Ben Clark, Jon Polgar, Dylan Flye, Cambrian Thomas-Adams, John Reese, Michael Fleck, Sigrid Van Wendell and Moe McElligott. And Paula Kimper, the composer of the Captivation of Eunice Williams, composed and performs accompanying music along with sound design by Christopher Isshi. Tickets are $18-$15 and are available at: www.tix.com or by calling (800) 595-4TIX (4849) or can be purchased at the Academy of Music box office on the night of the show.

WFCR spot about Bridge of San Luis Rey

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, a new folk opera by Paula M. Kimper adapted from the novel by Thornton Wilder is an investigation into the lives of five people who are suddenly killed when a bridge collapses into a deep gorge in the Peruvian Andes of 1714. It has resonance with other events that we have born witness to when innocents are taken without seeming sense. The Danbury (CT) NewsTimes called Paula’s orchestral suite of Bridge, “emotional and evocative…the overall effect was spellbinding.” This opera is the latest composition of the composer of The Captivation of Eunice Williams which is presently in preproduction for a Macedonian production in that country.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey will be presented in a workshop production at the Eric Carle Picturebook Museum in Amherst, MA for two nights on October 25, 26, 2007 at 8:00 PM. For tickets call the Northampton Box Office at: 1.800.the.tick or visit www.nbotickets.com
Kimper’s music has been called:
“A warm welcome to Patience & Sarah…Lincoln Center Festival’s Patience & Sarah is a rare—and moving—opera about women in love.” —New York Magazine
“At the end of the third act, there was a soaring affirmation in this music of the transcendent beauty of life and love. Members of the audience—men and women—jumped to their feet and screamed. That’s not impressive merely because a woman composed it; that’s just good opera.” —The New York Times
“Kimper’s music recalls Gian Carlo Menotti in its conservatism and Richard Strauss in its soaring vocal lines.” —USA Today“Reminiscent of Copland and Barber…the lyrical score bristles with impressionistic touches as well as unabashedly romantic flourishes.” —Opera News
Thornton Wilder’s second novel, THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, was published in 1927 to worldwide acclaim. The plot is deceptively simple: On July 20, 1714, “the finest bridge in all Peru” collapses and five people die. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan missionary, happens to witness the tragedy, and as a result, he asks the central question of the novel: “Why did this happen to those five?” He sets out to explore the lives of the five victims, and to understand why they died. Ironically, his quest will lead to his own death.
In later years, when someone asked Thornton Wilder about his purpose in writing THE BRIDGE, he replied that he was posing a question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual’s own will?”
THE BRIDGE received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was translated into many languages, and established Wilder’s reputation in “the front rank of living novelists. In 1998 it was selected by the editorial board of the American Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. The book was quoted by Tony Blair during the memorial service for victims of the September 11 attacks in 2001. Richard Lacayo in his review of the best 100 books for Time Magazine about Bridge, “In 1714, ‘the finest bridge in all Peru’ collapses and five people plunge to their deaths. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan missionary, decides to track down their individual stories to prove that even what seem to be random misfortunes are consistent with God’s plan. That his discoveries turn out to be more complex will come as no surprise. What may surprise are the beguilements of Wilder’s teasing, ironic, beautifully written tale, unlike anything else in American fiction.”

And this is Paula’s recent review of the orchestral suite of Bridge that was just performed in CT.

Music
May 11 2007 9:02 AM
Premiere highlights Community Orchestra concert
By Jan Stribula
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS-TIMES
DANBURY — The Danbury Community Orchestra gave the world premiere performance of a suite from “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” last Sunday and it was breathtaking.

Composed by Paula M. Kimper (b. 1956), the performance was at Ives Concert Hall at WestConn. Kimper and Steven Michael Smith, music director and conductor of the Danbury Community Orchestra, nearly brought the house down in their collaboration. Kimper had been working closely with Smith and the orchestra earlier in the week, fine tuning the suite which was derived in part from her opera.

Kimper’s composition was based on Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel set in the Peruvian Andes, involving a quest for meaning in the lives and deaths of people who perished when a rope bridge they were crossing failed. (In an interesting coincidence, on Tuesday The New York Times featured an article about similar suspension bridges, citing Wilder’s book.)

The wind chimes and flutes playing against droning strings created a sense of high altitude eeriness in the opening bars, with trumpets building up to the snapping cables and perilous descent. The solemn story unfolded with melodic majesty through the use of interesting orchestration including piano, woodwinds, and percussion. Emotional and evocative, the suite blended Spanish flavors with diverse thematic imagery. The overall effect was spellbinding.

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