Productions

ON THE EXHALE

by Martin Zimmerman, directed by Sheryl Stoodley

After a devastating school shooting and the death of her son, a mother develops an obsession with assault rifles that begins to take over every aspect of her existence, until she finds a way to begin to stop the pain of her loss. Included talkbacks on gun violence in the USA. (Solo performance by Elizabeth Solomon)

FAR AWAY

by Caryl Churchill, directed by Sheryl Stoodley.

An environmental call to action, based on the premise of a world in which everything in nature is at war.

(Ensemble: Linda Tardif, Dan Morbyrne, Robyn Sutton-Fernandez)

THE RED GUITAR / 2018

DO IT NOW: Manual Override

Both directed by Sheryl Stoodley

Spoken word with electric guitar and rhythmic percussion & song, commentary on contemporary present social & political issues in the USA. (With Paul Richmond, John Sheldon and Tony Vacca)

Further description of THE RED GUITAR below.

LOVE & INFORMATION

by Caryl Churchill, directed by Sheryl Stoodley

Ensemble play which unfolds with interweaving mini plots that deal with the ways we lust for, process, and reject knowledge in today’s world.

(Ensemble: Natalie Djondo, Lisa Enzer, Nanette Mendieta, Dan Morbyrne, David Regan, Patrick Ryan, Linda Tardif)

BLANK

by Nassim Soleimanpour (Iran), presented by Serious Play

This inventive and engaging script reverses the typical theatre experience with a script riddled with blanks leaving the audience in charge of how the story will unfold for two randomly selected audience members brought to the stage. As per playwright instructions there was a different actor creating each performance. (Tod Randolph, Will MacAdams, and Kali Quinn)

IN THE DARK TIMES THERE WILL BE SINGING

A collaborative presentation by community artists coordinated by Serious Play, with poetry, readings, live music & speaker Bill Newman (ACLU), celebrating freedom, and protesting the 2016 inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president.

All donations from this event went toward supporting the ACLU.

WHITE RABBIT, RED RABBIT

by Nassim Soleimanpour (Iran) and presented by Serious Play

No set, no rehearsal & a script unsealed by the one actor in the show, who reads it to the audience for the first & only time.  Randomly chosen audience members populate the stage and have their basic belief in what is or is not plausible, challenged in a potentially life-threatening situation, evoking the basic emotional challenge of being a political person imprisoned in their own country. As per playwright instructions there was a different performer each night. (Kermit Dunkelberg, Jessica Litwak, and Patrick Gaughan)

THE RED GUITAR 2016

Written & performed by John Sheldon in collaboration with director Sheryl Stoodley.

THE RED GUITAR toured to Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2016 & 2018.

Guitarist John Sheldon uses a unique blend of storytelling & layered electric guitar licks, to send the audience zipping through the folds of time, from James Taylor to Jimi Hendrix, emerging into an original transformative melody which developed into his acclaimed song, The Grand Parade.

ENDGAME PROJECT

directed by Sheryl Stoodley with collaborating artists, Eric & Ines Zeller Bass, Sandglass Theater, and Puppeteer, David Regan

An adaptation of Beckett’s Endgame, ENDGAME PROJECT, toured the Valley to the Academy of Music, Gateway City Arts & Studio 4 SCDT.

Hamm & Clov coexist in a cellar surrounded by a wasteland of a world that cannot be visited anymore except through memories. No one can leave for the outside since it is far too dangerous. Beckett’s minimalist style, absurdist relationships and wry humor raise relevant questions about what it means to be consciously alive. Career puppeteer David Regan realized Hamm’s parents (characters Nell & Nagg) as puppets for this adaptation.

(Ensemble: Rand Foerster, Kermit Dunkelberg, and David Regan)

“An astounding tour de force of acting: when Hamm took off, then replaced, his dark glasses, I realized (with a sinking heart) that we were not going to be able to see his eyes. And with his body immobilized, he would have to convey motion, emotion and meaning in his extraordinarily mobile, rubbery face and voice—and he did. Hamm as the still center of the play—and the world—reflected how we each think of ourselves. Clov, the brilliant foil, the shoring up and the undermining of our sense of self and possibility. Waiting for something to happen, knowing nothing would happen. How could that be so riveting? The power and brilliance of the performance. The entrapment of the two men, of the puppets, of ourselves as audience, felt shockingly familiar.”

- Rosalyn Driscoll, Haydenville, Sculptor

“Their slow burned rehearsal process is evident in an ensemble that knows their way backwards and forwards through Beckett's script and is able to respond organically to each other.  It is a pleasure to be brought into this disarming world by people who have so thoroughly explored the terrain... and are still exploring it....  I have seen the production inhabit both the opulent stage of the Academy of Music in Northampton (audience seated on stage with our backs to the cavernous empty auditorium) and Holyoke's Gateway City Arts Center (a warehouse where sound echoed and the set blended with the space itself). Sheryl Stoodley has directed a production of Endgame that adapts to new surroundings allowing them to infuse its sensibility without compromising the precision of the ensemble creation.

Serious Play’s production of Endgame is a beautifully crafted, stunningly performed, and richly evocative take on a play that has been critically celebrated as an “unforgettable tour de force and probably its author’s single most remarkable work. … The staging of the production is appropriately spare and essential, nothing is imprecise, or without point and impact. The performers are genuinely impressive in their disciplined physicality and in their capacity to, most affectingly, embody their starkly compromised, surprisingly comedic, and anxiously stalemated characters.”

- John Hellweg, Theater Professor, Smith College

FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF

by poet/playwright Ntozake Shange, directed by Sheryl Stoodley, assistant director & musical adaptation by Kaliis Smith

Toured to Northfield Mount Herman and Springfield.

Through poetry, movement & song this ensemble of black & brown women address the audience, sharing the message that no matter how bad things can get in life and no matter how many times you’ve been brought down, always know you are strong enough to get back up, and never let darkness conquer your life. (Ensemble: Vanessa Alexander, Janaya Barnes, Alyssa Cutting Cosby, Marcia Gomes, Evelyn Harris, Kaliis Smith, Samantha Smith)

BLIND DREAMERS

directed by Sheryl Stoodley, choreography Lisa Enzer & Sheryl Stoodley, music composed & performed by John Sheldon

Toured to Mt Holyoke College and Irondale Theater Center, Brooklyn

Devised theatre production composed of movement, music and text: reshaping and further exploration of META PINA production. The ten actor multiracial & multigenerational ensemble, pairs a five-member nuclear family—father, mother, three young adults—with their inner selves, revealing what lurks beneath the veneer of polite civility; a fractured domestic narrative with action underscored with original music performed live. (Ensemble: Axel Cruz, Carissa Dagenais, Rand Foerster, Rachel Garbus, Constance Leslie, Taylor Middleton, Annelise Nielsen, Carolyn Shakti Sadeh, Kaliis Smith, and Katelyn Tsukada)

META PINA

directed by Sheryl Stoodley and Toby Bercovici

META PINA is a devised production drawn from the rehearsal process of choreographer Pina Bausch. The piece developed from improvised movements & structured interactions informed by the performers personal histories (incorporating some of Bausch’s trademark themes), through which emotional & narrative connections emerged. It’s the story of an extended family whose veneer of polite civility masked tensions & dark secrets. (Ensemble: Grace Booth, Carissa Dagenais, Rachel Garbus, Dunan Herman-Parks, Dan Kinsey, Constance Leslie, Josh Perlstein, Carolyn Shakti Sadeh, Kaliis Smith, and Ren Steger)

I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE: Secret Life Of Girls Around The World.

by Eve Ensler, directed by Sheryl Stoodley

I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE: Secret Life Of Girls Around The World is a staged reading with a diverse ensemble of young women. Fierce, tender, smart, this play is a celebration of the authentic voice inside every girl and a call to action for girls everywhere to speak up and become the women they were always meant to be.

(With Nora Kaye, Annelise Nielsen, Elana Fuentes, Rachel Garbus, Peaches Johnson, Caitlyn O’Brien, Sey Bounds, Kaliis Smith, Nora Lynch, Ren Steger, and Vanessa Alexander)

SNAKE & FALCON by Jessica Litwak, directed by Sheryl Stoodley

Jessica Litwak’s HEAT Collective makes theatre for social change & community engagement, expressed through: Healing, Education, Activism, & Theatre. SNAKE & FALCON fictionally explores a little-known byway of American history: the brief but momentous encounter between the anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman, & a young J. Edgar Hoover, who in 1919, as a rising star in the FBI, called Goldman the most dangerous woman in America, as he engineered her deportation.

(Ensemble: Michael Greehan, Jessica Litwak, Matthew Haas, and Becca Van Horn)

WIDER THAN THE SKY by Jessica Litwak, directed by Sheryl Stoodley

WIDER THAN THE SKY describes a love story in neuroscience, addressing issues of status in an institutional culture & the ethics of using conscious beings, Rhesus lab monkeys, for medical research; serving as an allegory for America’s appetite for domination and how that appetite affects the dominated & the dominator. WIDER THAN THE SKY toured to the Museum of Science, Boston.

(Ensemble: Jessica Litwak, Matthew Haas, Eliza Greene-Smith, Oliver Burns, Michael Greehan, and Maureen McElligott)

“Ms. Stoodley's theatrical vision encompasses not only a wide aesthetic spectrum of plays by classic writers and by such exceptional while not-yet-widely-known playwrights as Jessica Litwak, Lenelle Moise, and Alice Tuan... but also embraces an impressive spectrum of performance participants (from professionals to adolescents, mid-life, and elderly community performers) as well as forms of ensemble creation and non-traditional audiences.”

-Len Berkman, Anne Hesseltine Hoyt Professor of Theater, Smith College

MILOSEVIC AT THE HAGUE

Original Serious Play commissioned script by Milan Dragicevich, directed by Sheryl Stoodley, Music composed and performed by John Sheldon, Vila choreography by Marta Renzi, Sculpted hand design by Miguel Romero.

Toured to the JoakimInterfest in Kragujevac, Serbia.

MILOSEVIC AT THE HAGUE follows the philosophical corruption of Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic (1990s), after the dissolution of Yugoslavia into the disjointed & nationalistic Balkan states. Explores the seduction of power and its potential to magnify ambition in any of us.  The story interweaves Milosevic’s jail cell reflections, his trial at the Hague, two Serbian adolescent believers & their tragic stories, with those of the NATO action, and American Civil War General Sherman, exposing parallels to today’s world. The message is one of cautious hope.

(Ensemble: Kermit Dunkelberg, Marina Goldman, Court Dorsey, Adrienne Paquin, Alyssa Wright, Peggy Gillespie, Kim Mancuso/Barbara McEwen, Linda Tardif, Dan McNamara, Nick Simms,Troy Mercier, Andrew McClellan,Eric Rehm, Rich Vaden, Anna Dynarski, with live music from brass band, The Primate Fiasco.)

“Sheryl Stoodley (Serious Play), and I collaborated on the development of MILOSEVIC AT THE HAGUE for almost 2 yrs. It was a very fruitful partnership, one that created a new kind of theatrical experience, combining physical theater, live music, dance elements, projections, a non-linear narrative, and historical research, including the use of court transcripts from the International War Crimes Court at The Hague. Sheryl brought many bold initiatives into the MILOSEVIC project.  Her decision to stage the play along a “runway,” where the audience was seated on both sides of the playing space (like a fashion show) was an inspired one, as it opened up fantastic opportunities to include the audience in the world of the play.  The audience, like a seated jury, was asked, in a sense, to participate in the unfolding action, to render a verdict.”

-Milan Dragicevich, Associate Professor/Performance, Department of Theater, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

“I have known Sheryl Stoodley's work as director and actress for four decades, both prior to and during her becoming my student in the Graduate Theatre program that I have run at Smith College since 1969, and in all the years since. Ms. Stoodley's founding and artistic directorship of Serious Play, a company based in Northampton, Massachusetts -- but which has brought its work to important professional venues in NYC Boston, and Athens, London, Serbia, as well as to public schools, college campuses, and prisons -- reflects the range and depth of her theatrical and educational achievements.  I feel blessed and honored to have been involved with an array of Serious Play productions, workshops, and projects, including my roles as script development dramaturg for Milan Dragicevic's Milosovic at the Hague (powerfully directed by Ms. Stoodley in its series of production incarnations) and Donna Jenson's What She Knew (a brave autobiographic solo piece, performed by its author on tour in theaters and in prisons, and centered on the survival of father-daughter incest abuse.)  My attendance at select rehearsals of these two challenging high-impact productions provided me with yet fuller direct evidence of Ms. Stoodley's directorial expertise, solidly grounded in her intelligent and humane approach to script dynamics, subtleties, and jolting insights.”

-Len Berkman, Anne Hesseltine Hoyt Professor of Theatre, Smith College

OF TURLY GODS & TIME: Tale of King Lear

Serious Play emerging director Toby Bercovici

New interpretation & deconstruction of Shakespeare’s Lear with cross gender casting. The aging king decides to step down from the throne & divide his kingdom among his daughters. He tests them, asking each to tell him how much she loves him. Two give their father flattering answers, but Lear’s youngest daughter remains silent, stating she has no words to describe how much she loves her father. Lear flies into a rage & disowns her. This production explores Lear’s tragic journey leading to the disintegration of authority, order and family. Through a stylized inhale, Lear wills the dead to life to tell their story.

(Ensemble: Dan Morbyrne, Kyle Kate Dudley, Ellen Morbyrne, Monica Giordano, Linda Tardif, Arnaldo Rivera, Sam Perry, Alyssa Wright, Mat Bussler, Michael Pray, and Brittany Costa)

MY NAME IS MEDEA

Guest director/ collaborating artist Frank Borrelli

MY NAME IS MEDIA is a devised ensemble production that explores the Greek Medea myth and how it relates to personal and sexual identity.

(Ensemble: Eddy Avery, Osmar Ramos-Caballero, and Alyssa Wright)

COMMEDIA DEL SMARTASS by Sonya Sobieski, directed by Serious Play emerging directors Dan & Ellen Morbyrne

A stylized comedy in which the Girl Scout wants to get into a good college, the Fencer reads Machiavelli, the Clown has a secret and Henry just wants to make it through the day. A reminder of the treacherous ecosystem of high school, as an opening salvo for the rest of life. 

(Ensemble: Michael Pray, Sigrid Von Wendel, Trine Boode-Petersen, and Dan Krystern)

THE BOXMAN PROJECT directed by Serious Play emerging director, Keith Bailey

THE BOXMAN PROJECT is a stylized adaptation of the absurdist book by Kobo Abe.

(Ensemble: Rebecca Rohm-Frank, Michael Pray, Jecca Steinberg, Jack Styles, Sigrid Von Wendel, and Trine Boode-Petersen)

MATERMORPHOSIS by poet/playwright Lenelle Moise, directed by Sheryl Stoodley.

MATERMORPHOSIS is a new original adaptation of the Kafka story, Metamorphosis. Through magical realism, stylization & dark comedy, this play imagines Kafka’s Gregor as a working mother (Gregora) who goes through “the change,” feeling devoid of grace, beauty, femininity. This selfless, overworked woman transforms into a giant beetle, settles into her exoskeleton & is alienated by her beloved family. Her compassion for her family & their social & economic plight increases as they neglect her, until she dies. A comment on female gender roles in today’s society.

MATERMORPHOSIS toured to the KO Festival, Amherst.

(Ensemble: Linda Putnam, Alberto Peart, Glenn Love, Alexis Reid, Steve Bailey, Billy Girard, and Jeannine Haas)

SPRING’S AWAKENING by Frank Wedekind- stylized adaptation by Serious Play emerging director, Dan Morbyrne

The play tells the story of teenagers discovering the inner & outer tumult of teenage sexuality. It criticizes the sexually oppressive culture of nineteenth century Germany by dramatizing the erotic fantasies that it breeds.

(Ensemble: Taryn Biggs, Trine Boode-Petersen, Mandala Francisco, Yolian Ortiz, Alberto Peart, Michael Pray, Doug Rosenberg, Jecca Steinberg, and Jack Styles)

TROILUS & CRESSIDA directed by Sheryl Stoodley

TROILUS & CRESSIDA is an adaptation of the Shakespeare’s play which explores the ten-year war waged by the Greeks against Troy to recover Helen, & return her to her Greek husband. (Story from Homer’s Iliad). Conceived in light of the US war with Iraq, and drawing on research from the book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.

When the rhetoric of war is long forgot, what happens to the heroic dead, the bereaved mothers, fathers, husbands, wives and children of those killed and lost? What comes of those who made, in the glib term of politicians, the supreme sacrifice?

(Ensemble: Arnaldo Rivera, Russ Rakouskas, Ellen Morbyrne, Trine Boode-Petersen, Candy Santiago, Yolian Ortiz, Jacob West, Gerald Grandfield, Dan Morbyrne, and Doug Rosenberg)

BENDICION Collaboration with playwright Greta Purnima Sanchez & dramaturg Migdalia Cruz.

BENDICION is a commissioned play based on the life of Serious Play actress Carla Tome, born in Venezuela as an albino woman; it addresses her struggles & successes moving away from her South American roots as she embraces her lesbian identity, and makes her home in the USA.

(Ensemble: Carla Tome, Jacob West, Julissa Rodriguez, Arnaldo Rivera, Candy Santiago, Dan Morbyrne and Ellen Morbyrne)

IMPERFECT SATISFACTION

Stylized production by Serious Play emerging director Candy Santiago.

IMPERFECT SATISFACTION is a compilation of classic & contemporary love scenes interwoven with music and choreographed movement.

(Ensemble: Yolian Ortiz, Arnaldo Rivera, Julissa Rodriguez, Carla Tome, Jacob West, and Dan Morbyrne)

COASTLINE by Alice Tuan, directed by Sheryl Stoodley, collaborating choreographer Mollye Maxner, puppet design for Senator Neck, Policeman & Simon by Garland Farwell

COASTLINE simulates computer culture rhythms & rap music in a live stage space where the audience are the users & determine the order of the scenes for each performance by choosing cards with a letter from C-O-A-S-T-L-I-N-E.  Two young adult rap artists take a raw & radical road trip across the USA. They test the present-day world, and all the media manufactured stereotyped characters in it, searching for essential reasons for living now, in a time they see dominated by governmental arrogance, corporate lying, military aggression & personal pettiness.

COASTLINE toured to Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

(Ensemble: Dan Morbyrne, Candy Santiago, Brandon Lappie, Beejay Mangels, Carla Tome, Ellen Morbyrne, Julissa Rodriguez, Jacob West and Tim Dolan)

High praise for COASTLINE by Alice Tuan. Through innovative stage techniques that clearly mesh the influences of Suzuki, Viewpoints and Hip-Hop and puppetry, this wild melange of text, movement and music was one on the most successful artistic event in the Pioneer Valley this season.

-Talvin Wilks, Interim Artistic Director, New World Theater / UMASS

BORIQUA: INSIDE OUT directed by Serious Play emerging director Carla Tome

An adaptation of Coser y Cantar, by Cuban-American playwright Delores Prida, BORIQUA: INSIDE OUT examines the concept of identity, experienced by bi-cultural women living on the fence between two identities in the United States.

(Ensemble: Julissa Rodriguez and Candy Santiago)

WORDS WORDS WORDS from ALL IN THE TIMING by David Ives, adapted & directed by Serious Play emerging director Dan Morbyrne

Performed on a jungle gym, under the watchful eye of an unseen scientist, this comedy recalls the philosophical adage that three monkeys typing into infinity will sooner or later produce Hamlet. It asks, What would the monkeys talk about at their typewriters?

(Ensemble: Matthew Bussler, Keith Bailey and Ellen Morbyrne)

THE SKRIKER by Caryl Churchill, adapted and directed by Sheryl Stoodley.

This all female cast, manipulating a large rolling plexiglass cube symbolizing dream logic, finds two troubled young women who become embroiled with mythical spirits. A pagan underworld, whether real or imagined, surrounds them, as the play ventures into the darker parts of our collective unconscious, as the Skriker, an ancient damaged shape-shifter, seeks love & revenge.

THE SKRIKER toured to Boston Center for the Arts.

(Ensemble: Kiki Bertocci, Ellen Morbyrne, Kristen Blakely, Carla Tome, and Anne-Marie Wayne)

THE LARAMIE PROJECT directed by Sheryl Stoodley

THE LARAMIE PROJECT, compiled from over 200 interviews & journal entries by Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre, is based on the true story of Matthew Shepard, the gay young man who, in1998, was savagely beaten & left to die in Laramie, Wyoming. The Tectonic Theater traveled to Laramie in the aftermath of the murder creating a theatrical portrait of a town coming to grips with a hate crime. Serious Play’s adaptation mirrors Laramie by involving the Northampton community itself as performers, and exposing the conflicts for debate. Presented in downtown Northampton, at the First Churches.

MARAT SADE: What’s Left Is Not Right by Peter Weiss, adapted and directed by Sheryl Stoodley with new music by Elizabeth Swados arranged by Mitch Chakour, and choreography Liza Enzer

A new adaption of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, MARAT SADE toured to the American Theatre of Actors, NYC and Rosemary Branch Theatre, London. Inside the mental fencing in a modern day mental health clinic, in the hands of patients acting out a play, rages a philosophical debate about revolution & social change. Jean Paul Marat believes violence is necessary for social change, as his writing incites action that kills innocent and guilty alike. Where does the violence end? asks the Marquis de Sade, director & voyeur of the inmates’ performance. Is violence inherently embedded in human nature itself? This piece uses movement, song, music & moments from the French Revolution, to comment on & question the violent aspects of humanity, still glimpsed in revolutions that remain prominent in the world’s news. As the song goes, “We want our rights and we don’t care how. We want a revolution now.”

(Alumni Ensemble: David Inglis, Dan Morbyrne, Arnaldo Rivera, Devon Harlow, Julissa Rodriguez, Candy Santiago, Carla Tome, Keith Bailey, Ellen Morbyrne, Luke Meginsky, and Dave DelloRusso)