To coincide with this weekend’s presentation of Norman Corwin’s “The Rivalry”—about the Lincoln-Douglas debates—the Emelin Theatre will have a special exhibit of authentic Lincoln documents and artifacts.

The exhibit has been curated by Seth Kaller, a leading historic document dealer and collection builder. Kaller has handled every Lincoln-signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation to be publicly sold in the last 30 years.

The exhibit will feature a variety of pieces:

The Lincoln-Grimsley Trunk. Just before setting off to begin his presidency, Lincoln deposited his personal effects in this trunk, and left it with Mary Todd Lincoln’s cousin in Springfield.

A page in his Lincoln’s own hand from his final State of the Union Address: “We are gaining strength…”

Lincoln’s “dividers:” The tool he used to plot troop movements on maps during the Civil War, accompanied by Robert Todd Lincoln’s May 1865 letter giving this unique relic to Thomas Eckert, a close Lincoln associate.

Original Harper’s Weekly illustrated newspapers: Including Lincoln’s inauguration, the Emancipation Proclamation, reports on the assassination, etc.

“The Rivalry” will be at the Emelin Theatre, 153 Library Lane, Mamaroneck. 8 p.m. Nov. 13; 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Nov. 14. $40. Group discounts. 914-698-0098. www.emelin.org.

Tickets are $12, $10 for seniors and $8 for children. With pre-purchase only, buy 5 and get the 6th one FREE!

The box office and performances are at Palisades Presbyterian Church is at 117 Washington Spring Road, Palisades. Details at www.childrensshakespeare.org.

For the better part of an hour, the couple watched actors from Infinity Repertory Theatre Company in Bedford Hills performing “Notes from a Hospital Bed” — the collected thoughts of Maria Fareri’s Poetry Corner. The poets meet weekly whenever they are in the hospital for treatment, under the auspices of the facility’s Child Life and Creative Arts Therapy department.

There were poems about pain, about friends, about family and sunflowers.

Milan, age 12, wrote:
“Home is where I want to be
Safe warm and cozy
no more sticks and pokes
just me and my family.
Home is where I wanna be
Safe and sound with family.”

This is the second year for “Notes from a Hospital Bed,” which began as notes that checking-out patients left for those who would occupy their room, says Jeannie Sweeney, who moderates Poetry Corner.

Some of the young poets from last year’s corner are back this year.

Michelle Mohan, of the Bronx, comes to Fareri to deal with a neuromuscular disease of the mitochondrial cells, the body’s “power plant,” she explains.

She was there last weekend and saw two of her poems performed.

She wrote “What If I Climbed Up a Rainbow,” she says, when a friend died.

It closes with the lines:
“What if I climbed up a rainbow and I got to see my friend,
What if I climbed up a rainbow and I found out the top of the rainbow was really the end.”

Those words, she hopes, will follow others and find their way into her paintings, another passion for the 18-year-old that is fed by the creative arts therapy program. (She has designed holiday cards to benefit the hospital. See box.)

Some of the poems can get pretty heavy, as in a girl’s letter that starts “Dear Pain: I know you are here to do a job, but can’t you do it somewhere else?”

But then there are the Jane-isms, quirky thoughts from the mind of 14-year-old Jane Varghese of Queens.

If Poetry Corner had a Lily Tomlin, it’d be Varghese, who warns a visitor not to take her photo because “I’m hiding from the Canadian police.”

When Natalie Tiffany, who performed the Jane-isms, chats with her after the show, she tells Jane that she lives in North Salem.

“Cool,” Varghese says without missing a beat. “Any witches down there?”

Erin Nelligan, a Kennedy Catholic High School student, was artistic director for this year’s “Notes” program. That meant the Yorktown teen-ager had to divide the poems into categories — seasons, teen angst, sad and emotional feelings and holiday, happy ones — and choose an Infinity cast member to perform it. She also worked with director Paul Andrew Perez to help shape the piece.

A veteran of last year’s inaugural program, when Nelligan learned that Michelle and Jane — two of the group’s favorite poets — were coming to see the show, “I almost had tears in my eyes, I was so excited.”

Michelle “writes poems that are as good as ones I’ve read in textbooks,” Nelligan says.

“Notes from a Hospital Bed” will be performed again Oct. 18 at the Pulse Performing Arts Studio in Bedford Hills. Pulse is the home studio of Infinity Rep and its co-founder, Jennifer Dell, has donated the use of the space to the performance.

The event chair for the benefit, which will begin with a silent auction at 3 p.m., followed by the performance at 4, is Angela Uzzi.

It’s Uzzi’s job to coordinate the efforts of the hospital, Infinity Rep and Trish’s Ribbon, a Katonah-based nonprofit that raises funds on a local level and focuses on helping schools and hospitals. Trish’s Ribbon was founded by Uzzo’s brother, John Burton, and his wife, Trish.

The benefit performance will be longer and more elaborate than the hospital performance (which John Burton dubbed “the acoustic version”), with music and projections and dance added to heighten the theatricality of the piece.

Patient-poet Jannel wrote: “The scar represents what I am going through and the courage and strength that I have.”

That couple in the front row bear scars of their own. They are Brenda and John Fareri whose daughter, Maria, died 14 years ago to the day before last Saturday’s performance.

Maria, from Greenwich, Conn., was 13 when she contracted rabies from a bat bite.

The cramped Westchester Medical Center she was rushed to bears little resemblance to the children’s hospital that has become her legacy, a place where children can paint and write and be with families as they battle illness.

“The kids are just amazing,” Brenda Fareri said after watching “Notes from a Hospital Bed.”

“This kind of program is an expression of who Maria was, I think, and maybe, through these kids, who she continues to be: that caring and simpatico.”

Photo by Peter D. Kramer/The Journal News: Natalie Tiffany, 14, left, of North Salem with Jane Varghese, also 14, of Queens after a performance of “Notes from a Hospital Bed” at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital in Valhalla. Natalie performed two of Jane’s funny musings—which the cast calls “Jane-isms”—at the event.

What: “Notes from a Hospital Bed”

When: 4 p.m. Oct. 18; silent auction and reception begins at 3 p.m.

Where: Pulse Performing Arts Studio, 238 Route 117 Bypass Road, Bedford Hills.

Tickets: $75

Call: 914-953-4306 or email angela@trishsribbon.org

Links: www.trishsribbon.org; www.infinityreptheatre.com; www.performthepulse.com; www.worldclassmedicine.com

How to help Donations to support the Child Life and Creative Arts Therapy department at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital can be sent to: Tricia Hiller, Child Life Director, Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at WMC Child Life Creative Arts Therapy, Department Room 3510, Valhalla, NY 10595. Or call 914-493-6657.

Holiday cards The Child Life and Creative Arts Therapy Department has created holiday cards, designed by pediatric patients. Check them out at www.worldclassmedicine.com/cards

Writes Becker: “The acclaimed Shakespeare Society gives us a behind the-scenes look at the process of taking Shakespeare from the page to the stage with Elisabeth Waterston (Classic Stage Company’s The Tempest opposite Mandy Patinkin and The Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing opposite Sam Waterston), Randy Harrison (Justin Taylor on Showtime’s “Queer As Folk”) and other notable Shakespearean actors in an open rehearsal of “Measure for Measure.”

“Commentary and discussion with Michael Sexton (pictured), The Shakespeare Society’s Artistic Director, and Shakespearean scholar Ruth Carpenter. A discussion and reception with the artists follows the program.

The show is at 8, the tickets are $25. The Emelin is at 153 Library Lane, Mamaroneck. 914-698-0098. www.emelin.org. Photo by Ellen Kelson

“I got into hip-hop when I turned 60,” says the kindergarten teacher from Bronxville. (That’s Betsy, No. 61—for her age—in the center at right, in a photo courtesy Gotta Dance & NBA Entertainment.)

“I discovered that I loved it and that it was genuine, so I took a class every Saturday at New York Sports Club in Manhattan, on Broadway.”

The folks in those Saturday classes called her “Betty,” not Betsy, so that became her hip-hop persona, a character she’d play, a woman who could shake things that the kindergarten teacher would keep still.
Betsy would use an inside voice; Betty was as wild as the street.

Both are about to become larger than life, featured in the new documentary film “Gotta Dance,” by Bedford filmmaker Dori Berinstein. It gets its New York theatrical release on July 31 at the Beekman Theater in Manhattan.

The film opens with a quote from theatrical great Florenz Ziegfeld: “Age doesn’t matter unless you are a cheese.”

It’s the central theme of “Gotta Dance,” a lively, fast-paced film that follows the inaugural season of the New Jersey Nets NETSational Senior Hip-Hop Dance Team, a dozen women and one man who performed at six games in the 2007 season.

Berinstein captures it all — from auditions to selection to rehearsals, rehearsals and more rehearsals — building to that first half-time performance when the NETSational Seniors caused, well, a sensation in front of 20,000 basketball fans.

At an age when some of their friends might be gettting fitted for artificial hips, 13 seniors were out there, center court, doing hip-hop.

Talk about defying gravity.

Berinstein’s cameras continue to roll after that first show, following the team through the wave of media requests  and some hiccups caused by their newfound success.

The cameras are there as three of the women shop at the White Plains Galleria, hoping to find a more Betty  wardrobe for Betsy.

After the audition, Betsy marvels at what Betty has just done.

“I kinda did a pole dance,” she says in amazement

Later, Betty/Betsy (as she comes to be called) is in her classroom at the Denton Avenue Elementary School on Long Island — in a segment titled “The Best Day of My Life” — teaching her kindergartners a rap song with an anti-bullying message.

Berinstein and editor Adam Zucker honed 250 hours of footage into a 90-minute film that has brought film festivalgoers to their feet from Tribeca to Williamstown to Palm Beach, where it won the audience award.

“I had in my mind for a long time a film that would be a celebration of life, of aging, of people taking their dreams and going out there and doing something they always dreamed of doing but never got the chance to do,” Berinstein says.

“Gotta Dance” goes beyond a cute movie about old folks not acting the way society expects them to act.

One of the sweetest scenes comes late in the film, when the Nets youngest dance team — kids in their tweens and teens — shares the floor with the seniors. The connections they make, born of mutual respect, speak to the power of shared experience.

Before a screening in Mamaroneck last night, film critic Marshall Fine said he knew his Emelin Theater Film Club audience would respond to “Gotta Dance.”

“Audiences tend to look upon documentaries as spinach, but this one’s different,” he said. “I won’t say it’s junk food, but it’s not spinach. It’s very entertaining and uplifting. I knew it was right over the plate for my audience.”

The hundred or so film fans at the Emelin screening didn’t disappoint. When the first dance number was shown, they burst into applause.

Walkup says she still gets a thrill performing, something she and a half-dozen of those trailblazers have continued to do with the Nets.

“The surprise is when you go out on the court and they still love us,” she says. “They still think we’re super. They’re laughing and happy as soon as we start doing hip-hop. I sometimes wonder ‘What do they see in us?’

“But sometimes we get more applause than the real dancers,” she adds, referring to the much younger Nets Dancers, two of whom had grandmothers on the original senior hip-hop squad.

Berinstein’s films have won awards, as have the Broadway shows she produced, including “Thoroughly Modern Millie” and “Legally Blonde: The Musical.”

She combined her passion for film and theater in 2006’s documentary “ShowBusiness,” which chronicled a Broadway season through the prism of four shows.

Her theatrical side is evident with the rollout of “Gotta Dance,” which will hit the ground running next week.

“We want to make it an event,” she says enthusiastically.

Next Thursday at 11 a.m., the senior dancers — and all the Nets dance teams, mascots and some stars of Broadway — will gather in Duffy Square near the half-price ticket booth to teach the “Gotta Dance Slide” to anyone who’s game.

Next Friday, “Gotta Dance” opens a one-week run at the Beekman Theater, 1271 Second Ave. (212- 585-4141.) As they did at the Emelin, some of the dancers will perform after the Beekman screenings and there will be talk-backs and giveaways.

The film then opens in three theaters in New Jersey, in Portland, then in Los Angeles and on to Arizona and Florida, two states with their share of seniors who Berinstein hopes will connect with the film.

The documentary, it seems, is just the start of things for “Gotta Dance.”

• Royal Caribbean Cruise Line has a “Gotta Dance” multi-generational hip-hop dance program on 20 of its ships.

• A social-networking Web site — www.gottadancewithus.com — looks to connect those who love to dance but haven’t tried. The film has a presence on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr.

•  The “Gotta Dance” Project is a non-profit designed to bring generations together through dance, health, fitness, and mentoring. (Donate at www.gottadancethemovie.com.)

• A Broadway adaptation of the documentary is in the works.

• There is talk of adapting the documentary into a fictionalized feature film.

“To me, it’s a lot more than a movie. It’s more of a movement,” Berinstein says. “To inspire everybody to go chase a dream and to not look at things like ‘Oh, now that I’m this age, I can’t do this anymore.’”

“Gotta Dance”
Where: at Beekman Theatre, 1271 Second Ave. (between 66th and 67th streets).
When: Opens July 31. Limited, one-week engagement.
Screenings: Noon; 2:15 p.m.; 4:45 p.m.; 7:15 p.m.; 9:20 p.m.
Call: 212-585-4141

You can win tickets to Gotta Dance. Go to www.gottadancethemovie.com/contestentry.html

Next at Emelin
Next Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., the Emelin Film Club screens “Cold Souls,” with Paul Giamatt playing an actor named Paul Giamatti who finds a company that can extract a person’s soul and deep freeze it for later use. When Giamatti’s soul is stolen, he sets off to find it. Writer and director Sophie Barthes will join Marshall Fine for a post-screening Q&A. For tickets, emelin.org.

Yes, seniors doing hip-hop. But it’s more than just cute old folks shaking their booties. “Gotta Dance” extends the story to talk about self-esteem and aging, about finding value in yourself long after society’s sell-by date.

Tickets are just $15 and include a post-screening Q&A led by Marshall Fine.

Berinstein, a dynamo who was a producer of “Legally Blonde” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” is planning to bring “Gotta Dance” to Broadway, a happy development for a generation of senior actors who deserve to be seen in more than character roles.

I’ll be there. If you go—and you should—stop by and say hello.

The Emelin is at 153 Library Lane in Mamaroneck. For tickets, call, 914-698-0098. Or go to www.emelin.org.

That’s Betty, who took on the persona of Betsy, in the No. 61 jersey in the front on the right. (The jersey numbers were their ages.)

Leavel, who has a wicked sense of humor and a great voice, will join Liz Callaway and a list of yet-unannounced divas. Hudson Stage, started 10 years ago by Olivia Sklar, Denise Bessette and (Callaway’s husband) Dan Foster, is an exceptional local theater company.

Each summer—and always the weekend I am on vacation—they hold a wingding of a shindig featuring Broadway songbirds.

In years past, the list of talent has included Ann Hampton Callaway (Liz’s sister), fellow Croton resident Audra McDonald, New Rochelle’s Andrea McArdle, Shoshana Bean (“Wicked”) and this year’s Tony-winning best actress in a musical, Alice Ripley (“Next to Normal”).

Leavel is a considerable talent and should fit right in with whomever makes their way to the stage at a fantastic home on Baptist Church Road in Yorktown Heights. There’s a cocktial party at 7 p.m., a concert at sunset and coffee and dessert after the show.

Tickets to mark the 10th anniversary are 10 percent off, at $90 per person, and can be purchased online (at www.hudsonstage.com) or at 914-271-2811.

But for the Purchase Repertory Theatre’s junior company, this weekend’s trip to the Emelin will take them a lot farther than down the Hutch to Mamaroneck Avenue and Library Lane. It will teach them a useful skill: How to create a show in one place and take it elsewhere.

Tomorrow, the company — which has always performed in Purchase’s Abbott Kaplan theater — opens  a weekend run of David Ives’ “All in the Timing,” eight one-act plays.

Bob Wiener, of Mamaroneck’s Maxx Properties, is the man behind this change of theatrical venue.

“He has been so good to us,” says Purchase’s interim dean Greg Taylor. “Our productions don’t use state money. He basically pays for junior productions and he paid separately for this production” to the tune of $16,000.

Wiener, a member of the Emelin board who also provides scholarship money to Purchase students,  says he hopes this weekend will foster “a friendship with mutual interests” between the two institutions. “I think they nourish each other.”

“We’re very excited about what Greg is going to produce at the Emelin,” Wiener says. “In these economic times, nothing is clear about what is going to catch on, but we’re hopeful and it’s that hope that I enjoy the most.”

Purchase junior Tabitha Holbert sees the road show as a milestone.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity,” the actress says. “Friends I have that are in conservatories, I have not yet heard of one of them getting to move their project that they’ve worked so hard on somewhere else.

“It’s amazing that we get to go to Mamaroneck and say ‘This is what we worked on.’”

The evening’s first performance will be delivered in the Emelin lobby as patrons gather: Brett Diggs in “A Singular Kinda Guy.” Seven other one-acts will be presented in the auditorium. (See box.)

The one-acts can be told in any order, says director Darrell Larson, adding: “This seven plus one has a progression to it that is unique to this production.”

That is how Ives wants it.

In an e-mail exchange, the playwright calls the collection of plays “a sort of Lego set that can be turned to many different purposes, to make whatever carnival you care to.”

“It all depends on what a director’s got on his mind,” he writes.

On Larson’s mind is exploring what Ives has to say about language.

“We selected the plays that get more and more naturalistic and deep and it goes to a very heavy place,” the director says. “But things are not what they appear. Things that look tragic are not tragic; they’re actually blessings and miracles.”

At Taylor’s invitation, Ives attended the first rehearsal, but refrained from offering advice that might conflict with Larson’s vision.

“I trust Darrell’s taste and talents, so I restricted myself to being an interested visitor,” Ives writes.

Taking a show off campus is a logistical feat, says production stage manager Danielle Disher, who brings together all departments: sets, costumes, sound, lights and actors.

It’s one thing to put on a show, she says. It’s another to pick it up and move it. Getting there has meant adding a  company manager, student Aidan O’Reilly, to oversee transportation, food and logistics.

“It’s a learning process for everybody,” says O’Reilly, who says that before coming on board she had no clue what a company manager did.

Lori Wekselblatt, is co-chair of design technology at Purchase.

“The aspect of touring is something you can only talk about in the classroom,” she says. “From the production end, what these kids are learning is that they have to take this production and adapt it to a new space. It’s making them come out of their comfort zone.”

The learning process included a site survey, learning the neighborhood, finding out where restaurants are, and the CVS. (Wekselblatt says “we’ll spring for Sal’s Pizza,” a favorite of locals.)

“All in the Timing” marks the first time one of costume designer Sara Hinkley’s designs has been realized.
“We design shows for school, but all you hand in is drawings. You never see them happen,” Hinkley says. “This is real clothes on real people.”

Taking the show to Mamaroneck means losing one thing a costumer leans on: “There are no laundry facilities at the Emelin,” she says. “We’ll be bringing extra undershirts and extra stockings.”

The idea of loading in a show in a different space is not something new for lighting designer Zach Blane, who works with Purchase alum Brian MacDevitt on Broadway, including on “13” and Will Ferrell’s “You’re Welcome, America.”

“It’s tough to let the show sit, tech it, pick it up, move it and set it down, for people who have never done it,” he says. “But the production staff is really organized and very collaborative. It could have been  a train wreck but it’s blossomed into a great production.”

Samuel Froeschle’s unit set presents “a David Ives world.”

“I asked ‘Where would he be writing this? Is he in a studio? An office?’” Froeschle says. “I came up with this New York apartment, very layered, beat up but taken care of.”

To capture the show’s surreal nature, Froeschle then turned the apartment on its head and set it on a canvas of sea and sky. Actors step over transoms to enter the space.

Sound designer Nicholas Harris says his design “had to be the glue that took us on this journey” from one play to the next. He and composition student Charles Ivan Punchatz came up with “time-travel” transitions to transport the audience.

“Imagine your life passing you by in 30 seconds and that’s what we presented, with quotes from presidents and musicians. The collection of your life in 30 seconds.”

Natalie Woolams-Torres appears in a bright yellow dress — as a chimpanzee trying to write “Hamlet” — in “Words, Words, Words.”

“It goes beyond character study,” she says. “It’s a musical. We’re acting as a bunch of musicians. We have to play off each other’s notes.”

“Unamundo,” the tongue spoken in “The Universal Language,” is  well-built gibberish, but Dru Smith treated it the “same as any text.”

“Instead of knowing what the words are, it really comes down to knowing what you’re trying to do with what you’re saying,” he says.

Melinda Nichols agrees.

“It’s all about using language to make this beautiful human connection,” she says.

That theme is repeated throughout, says Olivia Osol, who appears in “English Made Simple,” a deconstruction of party chatter.

“Once you find the same language as somebody else, a whole new universe opens up,” she says.

James Ortiz is Bill in “Sure Thing,” a courtship in a coffee shop that resets itself with each misstep.  It has a lot to say about how one change, one different answer, can affect the course of  our lives. It also demonstrates Ives’ way with words — and  his exactitude.

“So many of his plays are so technical,” Ortiz says, “that in a funny way, it’s like ‘hit your mark’ and no time for finding it and playing around with it. It’s about staying on your mark.”

Even if your mark moves to Mamaroneck.

“All In The Timing”
Where: A Purchase Repertory Theatre production presented at the Emelin Theatre, 153 Library Lane, Mamaroneck.
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets: $20; $15 for seniors and students.
Call: 914-698-0098.
Web: www.emelin.org.
With: Tabitha Holbert, LaTeisha Dukes, Andrew Smith, Natalie Woolams-Torres, Monica K. Ross, Brett Diggs, Melinda Nichols, Matt Lents, James Ortiz, Oliva Osol, Julia Lawler, Jason Ralph.
Which “Timing”?
David Ives’ “All in the Timing” is a collection of one-acts. At the Emelin this weekend:
• “A Singular Kinda Guy,” a man who knows exactly what he is.
• “Foreplay, or The Art of the Fugue,” about three games of miniature golf, played simultaneously by three different couples with remarkable similarities.
• “Words, Words, Words,” about the role of the writer.
• “The Philadelphia,” about asking for one thing getting something else.
• “The Universal Language,” about making connections with words of your choosing.
• “English Made Simple,” in which Ives boils down banal party talk to its essence.
• “Sure Thing,” on how new relationships are fraught with peril.
• “Long Ago and Far Away,” a more dramatic piece, about a couple dealing with change, what is real and what is imagined.

Photo by Angela Gaul/The Journal News: From left, Dru Smith, Matt Lents and Natalie Woolams-Torres portray Milton, Swift and Kafka in “Words, Words, Words,” part of a production of “All in the Timing,” to be presented at Mamaroneck’s Emelin Theatre Feb. 27, 28 and March 1.

Performances will begin June 20 and, while the exact order of openings is not set yet, O’Brien hopes to open the three shows — “Pericles: Prince of Tyre,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” — in consecutive weeks.

“We’ll be running repertory the entire summer,” O’Brien says. “It’ll be great for the actors who enjoy switching parts, doing one play one night and doing something hopefully very different another night. And with the third play, people actually get to have a night off every so often.”

The festival — presented in a tent on the grounds of the Boscobel Restoration in Garrison with a majestic view of the Hudson Highlands — approaches its 23rd season in a time of uncertainty for non-profit theaters.

O’Brien says he and festival executive director Susan Landstreet will huddle to consider the impact of the economic downturn  and then chart a way forward.

“I don’t think we can — without some examination — go straight into the way we’ve always done it before,” he says. “We need to make sure that our private donations are up to where they need to be and then figure out how big of an acting company we’re going to have and so forth. I’m holding off on some choices until I see where we are.

“One way to do it would be to cut every department by “X’ percent,” he says. “If you scale back cast size you kind of lose what we’re all about. We would lose the quality of our work if we made the cast smaller or went with a company that had fewer professionals.”

But O’Brien sees a silver lining to economic stormclouds.

“In my mind, what we need to do is to look at the current economic situation as an opportunity,” he says. “I feel like anybody who is trying to make the choice of ‘Do we get on the train and go and see a Broadway show and spend $600, wrestling with the transit system, having a fast dinner and taking the train home or we can take our cars, have a beautiful picnic in this extraordinary outdoor setting, see theater that is of very high quality for about a third the price?’

“This could be a real opportunity for us and I’m hoping we can make a few converts in the process.”

The festival, started as a fund-raiser in 1987, has grown into a regional theater that has won raves from critics and patrons for its clear, unadorned approach to Shakespeare and other classic works.

Plays are presented without sets and with the slightest of props: At Hudson Valley Shakespeare, an evening of theater means the words, the actors and a patch of well-worn earth.

The festival’s reach extends well beyond the tent. There’s a year-round education component, including a touring company that presents fully-staged productions (“Macbeth” this year), a program to teach student actors how to speak the speech, an artist-in-residence program that puts theater professionals in the classroom, a the summer apprentice program for college students and a Teaching Shakespeare summer institute.

But the summer plays are still the thing and this year’s offerings are a study in contrasts.

“Pericles,” one of Shakespeare’s late plays, tells the story of a prince who finds love, loses it and then travels from one farflung place to another. As in last season’s “Twelfth Night,” there is a shipwreck. And, as in last season’s “Twelfth Night” and “Cymbeline,” there is a family reunion.

“I don’t know if it’s my age or what, but I just find myself more affected by the late plays, where he’s more mature in assessing — fairly but in some cases, harshly — his own life and the plight of humans,” O’Brien says.

In the late plays, the endings aren’t really happy and they’re not easy, he says. The heroes are wiser for the experience.

“Modern storytelling and movie editing owes a lot to Shakespeare, who began that whole thing about changing locations, having a five-line scene there, jumping somewhere else and having a longer scene, jumping back and forth in time, stretching some things out and having other things happen very quickly.”

Things might not get more cinematic than the journeys of Pericles.

“There’s a lot of adventure in his story,” O’Brien says. “There’s something about his restlessness and urgency that propels him an compels him to go to all the different places. Sometimes, he’s running toward something, sometimes, he’s running away. And the reunion with his daughter at the end is so powerful and more primal than the one in ‘Cymbeline.’”

O’Brien says he’s still reading and re-reading the play to get a feel for characters.

“Sometimes, I’ll just open it up and pick a particular scene and try to look at it carefully. Then I’ll look at another one, but not necessarily beginning, middle and end. That’s just me and my counter-intuitive way of going about it. I start to figure out what the story is about without having to thread a plot through it.”
He says figuring out the characters out of sequence lets him learn about them outside the context of the play.

“Much Ado About Nothing,” was last performed at the festival in 1998, and continues the festival’s cycle of repeating favorites every decade or so. A director has yet to be named for the play, which is a battle of the sexes.

“Beatrice and Benedick are smart and mature and witty — and they’re not Romeo and Juliet,” he says. “They’re passionate but they’re not desperate. They have much more command of who they are and are able to take their time more.”

“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” is a madcap retelling of the entire Shakespeare canon in 97 minutes.

O’Brien will once again direct and has asked the 2008 cast to return for 2009: Christopher V. Edwards, Noel Velez, Jason O’Connell and apprentice Katherine Abbruzzese, who handled the considerable backstage chores and made a brief appearance.

“It did way, way better than anyone expected and it was extended a week last summer,” O’Brien. “With only two and a half week’s notice, the extension sold out completely.”

Three-show summers make for a busy spring of auditions, rehearsals and meetings with the technical staff — and a busy summer, to the Sept. 6 closing night.

“If it isn’t a lot of work, it’s kind of not worth it,” O’Brien says. “I wouldn’t change places with anybody, even in June. It’s too much fun.”

Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival
www.hvshakespeare.org
Call: 845-265-7858

Photo of Terrence O’Brien, top, by Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News

Second photo: Noel Velez, Christopher V. Edwards and Jason O’Connell romp their way through “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).” Photo by William Marsh.

The performance is Sunday, Dec. 7 at 7 p.m., on an off night from its New York City premiere engagement. Aquila company members will present scenes from this new adaptation, and discuss the making of this production.

It is directed by Aquila’s artistic director, Peter Meineck, a Katonah resident, who will lead Sunday’s discussion. Afterward, the artists will join the audience in the lobby for a champagne and dessert reception.

Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” is a modern American classic. The term itself has entered the language as a description of a ridiculously cyclical situation. The book was first published in 1961 and immediately caused a huge furor in the literary world.

Peter Meineck cast John Lavelle as Yossarian, a role that has been sought by lions of the American stage since the book hit bookstores in 1961.

Paul_Newman spent a year studying the role, never to play it. Richard Dreyfus signed on for a pilot that was never made. Jack_Lemmon, Eli Wallach, Anthony Quinn, Ben Gazzara all lobbied for the role that famously went to Alan Arkin in the 1972 Mike Nichols film.

CATCH-22
When: Dec. 7 at 7 p.m.
Where: Rosenthal JCC Theatre, 600 Bear Ridge Road, Pleasantville
Tickets: $25.
Call: 212-868-4444
Web: www.smarttix.com.

Visit the Series web site for more information on this show and the 2008/2009 season: www.thedeependproductions.org.