Totally Awesome Players & Delaware Young Playwrights Festival Hit the DTC Stage

DTC's Totally Awesome Players.
Photo courtesy of Delaware Theatre Company.

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Totally Awesome Players Performs Two Original Plays

Over 25 years ago, Charles Conway, Danny Peak and some brave young actors — with support from the Delaware Foundation Reaching Citizens with Intellectual Disabilities (DFRC) — began this inspiring ensemble of kids called the Totally Awesome Players (TAP) Program. This troupe, and its newer cohort, TAP 2 ensemble founded in 2012, employ acting skills and the creation of a play to increase the collaborative skills and active creativity of adults with intellectual disabilities.

Now, the group of adults still meets weekly to collaborate with one another and put on a show. This season, as always, began with a theme: Time to Change, brainstorming how our lives can change in small ways and large ways, and how we react to the changes that we are unable to control. 

From there, the group of 33 performers and nine volunteers devised two original plays: The Best Laid Plans, a story of four students in detention exploring the paths their lives might take, and One, Two, Three, Change, a woman’s journey of positive small changes that transform into larger life changes.

The players worked tirelessly from November to March, not only improving their acting and memorizing skills, but retaining and growing the fundamental pillars of the program established back in 1992: You Can’t Be Wrong — a brainstorming rule that encourages any and all ideas, and No Negatives — toward yourself or others.

On Monday, March 18, 2019 the ensemble will share their original works on the DTC mainstage in the culminating performance. Admission is $5, and a reception follows the performance. 

The TAP troupes meet weekly, and participants create, write, rehearse and perform a play. These original plays are presented on the mainstage of DTC and other community venues. The program has also offered in-school workshops at the Howard T. Ennis School, a school for students with significant disabilities located in Sussex County and Kent County Community School in Dover.

The winners of the Delaware Young Playwrights Festival.
Photo courtesy of Delaware Theatre Company.

DTC Fully Produces Five Student Plays

The Delaware Young Playwrights Festival (DYPF) is a program designed to provide an outlet for Delaware students in Grades 8-12 to get the professional playwright treatment. DTC brought in designers and professional actors to bring their plays to the stage with lights, projections, sound, costumes and props.

After months of writing and editing, the culminating performance was attended by 175 people and honored all 83 students who wrote plays this season. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Delaware Young Playwrights Festival Winners

• The Lines of Our Lives | Jordyn Flaherty, Charter School of Wilmington
• In All Honesty | Jalyn Horhn, MOT Charter High School
• (A Little Bit) of the Book of Exodus | Tristen Hudson, St. Elizabeth School
• Senior Year Shakespeare | John Morrison, St. Elizabeth School
• Star Signs and Book Shops | Madelyn Thomas, St. Elizabeth School

See www.delawaretheatre.org.

Igor & Elvis...A Pair Not to be Missed!

By Guest Blogger, Chuck Holdeman
Chuck is a regional composer of lyrical, contemporary classical music, including opera, orchestral music, songs, chamber music, music for film, and music for educational purposes. www.chuckholdeman.com

Tuesday evening's Delaware Symphony concert — the second in its elegant chamber music series in the Hotel DuPont's Gold Ballroom — was perhaps the quirkiest ever presented there. It featured bassoonist Jon Gaarder impersonating Elvis, in full regalia, performing composer Michael Daugherty's Dead Elvis, written in 1993 and incorporating the well-known chant for wrath of judgment day, the Dies Irae. As a former DSO bassoonist myself who performed this work in 2008, I took great pleasure in witnessing the whole wacky spectacle from the outside.

Daugherty chose the same instrumentation as Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale, a septet mixture of woodwinds, brass, strings, and percussion, the work which comprised the second half of Tuesday's concert. And speaking as primarily a composer now, I can continue to wonder — how did Stravinsky do it? There is a certain thinness in the texture with so few colors from each family of instruments, but this results in a wonderful clarity, a bracing zap to the ear of each instrument's declamation.

Perhaps the most poignant and plaintive movement was the duet for Gaarder's bassoon and Jonathan Troy's clarinet — so few notes and so much expression. The chorales near the end were gorgeous, but how 'bout the romping rhythms of the marches, the ragtime, and other dances? DSO concertmaster David Southorn was brilliant in the athletically demanding violin part; in time his Tango may become even more sly. All this is in the service of a Russian folk tale, a version by Swiss author C. F. Ramuz, originally in French. Conductor David Amado explained how the standard English translation can sound stilted and even boring, and so Amado undertook his own edited revision, very successful to this listener.

I particularly enjoyed the use of lots of rhyming, and also references to our time and place- the soldier marches "between Lums Pond and Bear," and at another point is treated to chicken wings. Three readers told the story: OperaDelaware's Brendan Cooke as the soldier, joined by two Delaware Theater Company executives, Bud Martin as a wittily sarcastic Devil, and Charles Conway as the Narrator. The large audience was uninhibited in both laughter and applause.

For Dead Elvis, Gaarder chose a sparkly white jumpsuit, white shoes, a thick (not really greasy) wig, and giant shades. He sauntered on stage with characteristic Elvis gestures and wiggles, and also smoothed his locks during the music's sudden pregnant pauses. The music is a study in zany extremes, the bassoon screaming to its ultimate high E or plummeting to its grotesque low B-flat. The tiny E-flat clarinet screeches, the trombone wails its glissandi, the drummer, the DSO's veteran master Bill Kerrigan, flails his collection of bells and other high-pitched gadgets.

I highly recommend this most entertaining and musically rewarding show which will be repeated Friday night, January 31 at 7:30 PM at the Queen Theater, World Cafe Live. The next two DSO concerts at the Hotel DuPont are on February 25 and April 1.

See www.delawaresymphony.org.

The Real Delaware Theatre Company

Bud Martin

The Delaware Theatre Company has just hired Bud Martin, the very successful director of Act II Playhouse in Ambler, Pennsylvania to the position of Executive Director. He started his duties on May 1. Mr. Martin inherits a wonderful site with a great deal of goodwill earned by previous prizes and plays and a wonderful education program at the DTC, but he will need our support.

Of course we should be ready to support him by buying tickets for the season he has planned for 2012-2013. The first play starting on October 10 is The Outgoing Tide, a story about a family who plan to deal with illness and their future while vacationing on the Chesapeake Bay. The author, Bruce Graham, is from the Philadelphia area and has won Barrymore awards for best new play twice. A compelling theme, a local playwright and a new director should have us all pull together and fill the house.

Delaware Theatre Company

The next shows will be of a lighter nature, making it even easier to boost ticket sales: Patrick Barlow’s production of A Christmas Carol is a rousing version sure to put the Christmas spirit in us all. Boeing Boeing by Marc Camoletti will also provide comedy for the dreary winter starting January 23. Then the season finishes with My Fair Lady starting on April 17.

Audiences have certainly dwindled for all of the arts in the past few years, and so have the educational programs which introduce our schoolchildren to the arts. DTC’s Charles Conway has been a fearless advocate of taking the theatre to the public – and not just to the fur-coated potential donors. Mr. Conway has won awards for his work with young people with disabilities. The program, Totally Awesome Players, has taken wings since he first designed it. He has also won the 2009 Stevie Wolf Award for New Approaches to Collaboration for his work with the Ferris School for Boys.

Is there a way to help promote these and similar programs in our schools – having kids experience theatre to get a taste of why their teacher makes them read Shakespeare and who they can emulate when they feel the urge to write? Will we provide that solid support that pushed the little firehouse play theatre into the anchor site on the Wilmington Riverfront that has taken root and helped the entire area to flourish?

If we do, then we shall have done what Cleveland Morris had so hoped for when he said of the current site, “Here lies every wonderful opportunity to relish our own city’s colorful past and participate in its even finer future.”

Let’s do it!

See http://delawaretheatre.org/