Fiddler on the Roof Jr.

December 9-19 , 2010

Directed by Stephen Stearns
A tale of family and tradition, set in Tsarist Russia, Fiddler on the Roof, by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, is the story of a family broken apart by many forces. Tevye has three daughters, and he would like to marry them off in a traditional style - a match maker chooses husbands for them, and the girls settle happily and grow into their matches.  The daughters have different plans.  Tzeitel falls in love with Motel the tailor, a nice young man.  But this disrupts her father's intentions to have her married to his good friend, Lazar Wolf, an old, rough, and unappealing option.  Hodel follows in her sister's footsteps and falls in love, without permission, with a traveling student who turns out to be a Bolshevik revolutionary constantly risking exile to Siberia.  Chava, youngest of the marriageable daughters, falls in love with a non-Jew. Can Tevye forgive his daughters for breaking with Tradition?  Will the family ever be together again? Can their roots in their village of Anatevka hold them all together?  Find out this December at the New England Youth Theatre in Brattleboro, VT!

 

VPR Profiles Restorative Justice

http://www.vpr.net/news_detail/89271/play-explores-restorative-justice/

NEYT’s ‘Quality of Mercy’ dramatizes restorative justice

Brattleboro Reformer
Thursday November 11, 2010

BRATTLEBORO -- New England Youth Theater partners with the Brattleboro Community Justice Center to present "The Quality of Mercy," directed by Rebecca Waxman, from Nov. 12-21.
A powerful theatrical collage of work inspired by class work during NEYT’s Season of Restorative Justice, this production will focus on sharing awareness of Restorative Justice with the wider community.
The performance is a multigenerational collaboration of youth and adult students, faculty, as well as alternating groups from within the Brattleboro community. Scenes, monologues, songs and theatrical presentations explore relevant themes of justice, retribution and healing. Material has been pulled from Shakespeare’s "Merchant of Venice," "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding, "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton, and many other great works, classic and contemporary.
Teachers leading classes this semester have trained with the Brattleboro Community Justice Center in elements of restorative justice, including role plays of what actually happens at a restorative justice conference.
This production is a part of International Restorative Justice Week, organized locally by the Brattleboro Community Justice Center. Last year, they held an open mike night at New England Youth Theatre to raise awareness, but this year they have received funding to do a partnership with the theater to create a performance.

The Crucible

October 15-24, 2010

Directed by Peter Gould & Sponsored by Prentiss Smith & Co, Inc.
Arthur Miller's The Crucible performs in Brattleboro.  Directed by Peter Gould, this play resonates in times of intolerance and persecution.  It is a classic of American Theatre - romantic, passionate, and full of political and religious controversy - not only is it good entertainment, but it will leave audiences with something to think about.

Gould directed this play in 2002, at a time of rising intolerance and political polarization--after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as the Patriot Act was renewed, and as the US was preparing to invade Iraq. The tiny stage in the old NEYT lent an atmosphere of cramped, explosive fear, and Gould's own historical research heightened the truthfulness of the young cast's performances. Gould previously played the role of Sarah Good in an intense production directed by John Carroll at the old Brattleboro Center for the Performing Arts, during a year (1976) when federal agents descended on Brattleboro to seek out suspected anti-American domestic terrorists who were presumed hiding on local communal farms.
Come to the show to see why this play is still relevant in today's world, and how it resonates with current audiences.

VPR News: Comic Duo Celebrates 30th Anniversary

Listen to Story

(Host) Brattleboro comics Peter Gould and Stephen Stearns have been working - make that clowning - together for thirty years this spring.
They're celebrating that anniversary this weekend with performances of their most popular shows.
VPR's Susan Keese recently went backstage to talk with the comic duo.
(Video Clip) "Howdy Buckaroo...So You think you can outdraw me? Put in a Quarter and see..."
(Keese) Peter Gould figures he and Stephen Stearns have done their coin-operated quick draw cowboy skit in every school in Vermont - and in 41 other states and several different countries
(Gould) "4,000 times I've done that skit and never come out on top"
(Laughter)
Stearns, a big man, plays a mechanized penny arcade cowboy in a ridiculously oversized 10 gallon hat....

Gould, the smaller of the two, never says a word, but he never stops slamming quarters into the imaginary slot.
(Machine digests quarter)..."So! You think you can outdraw me, Hunh?... One... two...
(Keese) And although the game is rigged against him, Gould never stops thinking up hilarious, hopeless schemes for outsmarting the machine.
(Stearns) "Three! Blam blam "
(Keese) Much of what's funny about Gould and Stearns is their physical comedy: acrobatic sight gags, perfectly timed gestures and elastic facial expressions.
It's comedy in the style of the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy.
Both Gould and Stearns started as mimes. They got to know each other studying in Maine with Tony Montanaro, a disciple of the famous French mime Marcel Marceau.
When Montanaro learned that Stearns was a trained Shakespearean actor, he suggested he use his voice.
(Stearns) "So we became Two Men Talking Mime."
(Keese) That was their original billing as they started touring.
Stearns says they had no trouble coming up with material.
(Start concertina low)
Stearns "We'd just get in front of a mirror and start to sway back and forth and we'd that looks like a ship. Let's do a piece about a ship..."
(Keese) That's Gould on the concertina. (continue music til he stops)
(Stearns) "Awk Awk "(Gould) "What's that?"
(Stearns) "It's a seagull.. All hands on deck!"(sound of hands) "No no not your hands on the deck"
Gould: "Well you said all hands on deck"
(Stearns) "All right everybody fall in"
Gould) "Oh-h-h"
(Stearns)" No don't fall in, it's an expression"
(Fade)
(Keese) There's also a more serious side to Gould & Stearns, that's revealed in Gould's two-person play, a peasant of El Salvador.
(Gould) "It's about an old man whose life is okay in the mountains of El Salvador. But it's a hard life. And he gradually watches as his whole life... comes crashing down all around him because of forces that he can't understand or know about."
(Keese) The play has become one of Gould and Stearns' best known works.
Over the last decade or so, Gould earned a Ph.d. and started writing novels.
Stearns began doing theater with young people. He launched the New England Youth Theater, in Brattleboro, where Gould is on the faculty.
And that's where the two, who are also still touring together, will celebrate their anniversary.
For VPR News, I'm Susan Keese.