Members of Second Step Players will perform one-acts they wrote
Judy Essex reflects on her new self-authored and self-starring one-person play, written and made performance-ready after just two months:
“Initially I found it frightening and I really didn’t want to do it, but I decided I had to make myself, (...) and once I started, once I got into it, it challenged me, but it also freed me,” she says.
Essex is a member of The Second Step Players, a Norwich-based comedy troupe and division of Artreach, a nonprofit mental health and arts agency that works to aid mental health recovery through theater, music, and the visual arts.
Since May, The Second Step Players have worked with playwright Kato McNickle, solo performance artist Emma Palzere-Rae and actor Rob MacPherson to create and perform works of their own, works that, Palzere-Rae says, really show “how important storytelling is to the human experience.”
The Second Step Players’ shows are each individualized, short one-person performances, written, workshopped, and performed by themselves. There will be 12 of these one-person shows, and they are not crafted in any prescribed format, though they all have a similar running time — all four to ten minutes long.
“This group of performers has composed a diverse set of works to be presented. While some delve into personal narrative, others are taking on topics like the divide between the homeless and the affluent, or set their tales in a fantasy forest, or present an ode to an influential teacher,” McNickle says.
She notes that the mantra at Artreach is “because creativity heals.”
“What I watch happen is often a person who has low self-esteem learns to gather the strength and the confidence to stand on stage and say that their story matters, that they have a voice,” McNickle says. “I also watch them support each other. I hear over and over again that Artreach becomes like a family for them, a place where they come to make art and be artists.”
Indeed, Beverly LeVoie, who wrote and performs one of the pieces in this series of one-acts, says, “I’ve gained back a lot of self-confidence that I didn’t think I had. Being at Artreach is one of the most wonderful things I think I’ve done for myself and I love everybody there.”
By showcasing these works, Artreach also expects to reduce negative stereotyping of people with mental health issues.
The pieces can be personal constructed narrative, like collections of stories or work drawn from personal experience; they can feature real events using multiple perspectives; or they can be entirely fictional, according to McNickle.
McNickle helped shape these works with her writing and directing experience learned from The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and from playwright Paula Vogel. McNickle says that “creating new work is always about balancing encouragement with candid observation.”
“Kato has helped me organize it,” says Second Step Player Jerry Cory. “I was originally going to write quite a bit or stuff — I was trying to psychoanalyze myself back to the age of 18, but Kato helped me cut it down. It’s been a good process.”
Because this is a developmental workshop, some of the performances will be script-in-hand, while some others will be off-book. Some performers will work new material in the public performance. Stage sets might be suggested, and costuming is minimal.
Since McNickle has started working with Artreach, she says she has learned about the difficulties of living with mental illnesses and dealing with the mental health system from people who experience it themselves on a daily basis. She hopes that this experimental performance will promote growth for their cause, and she hopes “that this performance workshop will spark interest for the members of Artreach and the local theater community. The next time we develop solo-works, I would like some of our local performers involved.”
Artreach One-Person Shows, 7:30-10 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Chestnut Street Playhouse, 24 Chestnut St, Norwich; $15; (860) 887-0014.
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