FOUR YEARS of DARK MONDAYS!
The popular monthly DARK MONDAY @ MERLIN series celebrates its FOURTH ANNIVERSARY in October with a Classic of American Literature; SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY by Edgar Lee Masters. This will be yet another Stuttgart Premiere!
SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY by Edgar Lee Masters is a collection of short, free verse poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters’ home town. When it was published in 1915, the author shattered the myth of small-town America as the bastion of American virtue. In his thinly veiled fictional town of Spoon River, the honest, hardworking, chaste, and churchgoing live amidst corrupt bankers, abusive husbands, unfulfilled wives, sexual deviants, and failed dreamers.
Although such experiences and views were part of American culture, poets had not written about them before.
In the groundbreaking work, Masters, a onetime law partner of Clarence Darrow, gives voice to more than two hundred deceased citizens of Spoon River who are laid to rest in Oak Hill Cemetery, known to the locals as The Hill. Each poem is an autobiographical epitaph of a deceased citizen, delivered by the dead themselves. Freed by the shackles of life, the un-living who “sleep beneath these weeds” confess their deepest secrets, disappointments, frustrations, joys, and warnings to the living in the form of brutally honest free verse poems.
No volume of poetry since Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS had attempted so much or had been so original.
Featuring Holly DeWolf, Sonja Bressner, Sylvia Owens, Cindy Halbern-Seger, Holly Scott, Samantha Harper, Kissy Schulze, Hana Kim, Tiffany Marie Estrada, Karin Heinrich, Helen Khorrami, Barbara Claussen, Andy Pugni, Michael Hilton, Jim Martin, Ravi Kanth. Derrick Jenkins
THE STUTTGART HARMONIZERS Barber Shop Quartet will provide appropriate, turn of the century popular music, from the era when SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY was originally published.
Performances: Monday, October 9 at 8pm in MERLIN and Thursday, October 12 at 8pm in THEATER AM OLGAECK
New English American Theater Stuttgart 