Preview Magazine June, 2007

Article by Andrew Varnon

Photographs by Paul Shoul


"Throwing art" is how Jessamyn Smyth puts it. It's about not waiting for grant funding or institutional support, but getting the work in front of people right there in your neighborhood, however you can.

When the Arena Civic Theater company took on a program of short plays and monologues by Smyth and Richard Ballon for its June slot, it collected two writers with a knack for this sort of throwing of the art. Smyth, now based in southern Vermont, not only wrote for, but produced two rounds of the Naked Theater project, staging one acts written on a deadline in The Elevens, a bar in Northampton. Ballon, who lives in Amherst, wrote a play for the gay/straight alliance of Easthampton High School and a six-part mini-series for Amherst Community Television.

And now, in a program of short plays and monologues, Smyth and Ballon are getting the community theater treatment. The Arena Civic Theater, one of three resident companies based at the Shea Theater in downtown Turners Falls, will be staging Smyth's play Hedda Gabler Has Left the Building as well as two of Ballon's plays, Benefit and Syphilis?, and two of Ballon's monologues, "Spirited" and "Paddy McClintlock," on June 8, 9, 15 and 16 at 8 p.m.

Smyth's play Hedda Gabler Has Left the Building sends up community theater as only someone deeply steeped in community theater can. It's the evening of a performance of the Ibsen play Hedda Gabler and everything that could go wrong has gone wrong: a key actress is a no-show, the tech guy is a stoner who forgot to bring half the set, the theater manager reveals he has triple-booked the play with a rock band slam and a poetry eading, and the romantic gallivanting of the cast has resulted in a mini-outbreak of herpes.

In an interview with Preview on a park bench in Brattleboro, Smyth said she considered it a badge of honor that in auditions, several actors nearly choked on their bottled water while reading the script and bursting out laughing, recognizing something from their own experience. Not only that, but halfway through production, there was a change in directors, so, once again, life in the community theater imitates spoof. "All of the Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman jokes are well-founded," Smyth said. But for her, the foibles of community theater are part of its overall charm. "You can either lose your mind," she said. "Or you can laugh and throw the art."

That phrase, "throwing art" is a key part of Smyth's philosophy. The impulse for playwrights to pursue what Smyth calls "the institutional paths to success" just "keeps a lot of really good works out of the hands of actors and away from audiences," she said. Instead, Smyth works to get her work up in a local venue and get it seen. "I've learned that there's a tremendous amount of talent in the local area," she said.

She inherited the reigns of Naked Theater from Greg Gibson, who founded it, and produced it for several years, but she said there was nobody there to pick up the ball when she moved on. But the idea of assembling actors and writers and directors locally and putting up rather impromptu theater in a bar really crystallized her ideas on making art. It attracted people to the shows who might not have thought of themselves as theater-goers.

Smyth loves the idea of the Shea Theater, which was an old movie house from the 1920s, then converted into a proscenium stage, then owned by Michael Mettelica and the Rennaisance Community as a rock venue, and then has been renovated as a community theater space with cooperation from the Town of Montague. "It's got this gloriously bizarre history," she said. And the Shea's community mission, which blends so well into the area's "buy local" aesthetic, is "the beating heart of Turners Falls," she said.

Ballon, too, has adapted himself to the small stage of locally-produced art. In an interview at a table outside Rao's Coffee in Amherst, Ballon wasn't shy in talking about his work, which he called minimalist and lyrical. "I feel like the short play is the poem of the theater and the monologue is its lyric," he said.

The day of the interview, Ballon had been reading proofs for his book, which will have been printed and released by the time this article is published. The book, a collection of poems, monologues and short plays, includes all the work Arena Civic Theater will be performing. It is called enough of a little to know the all, which suggests his minimalist aesthetic, and it is published by the local print shop Collective Copies. "Edward Albee says once you get to the point where your play is the right length, you should cut another 15 minutes," Ballon said. "If I did that, I'd be left with just an exclamation point, my plays are so short."

He explained that his play Benefit began as a poem and grew into a play when he realized it needed dialogue. In the play, the 50-something Meg Williamson finds her son's ex-lover, a minister. He recited a line from the play, to illustrate his ear for language. "Where do you get the recipe for them words," he said, reading the part of Meg. And then he said, "I like her character. She has a common voice, a dialect voice. She has suffered enough."

The monologue "Paddy McClintlock" came from Ballon's time in Ireland, restoring houses with the Irish Georgian Society. In it, the character Mary O'Connor tells her story to an American cousin while hanging her clothes on a clothesline. It begins, "We weren't allowed out of the yard in the morning when the shadows were long. If someone laid their shadow across yours, you belonged to them, and that was that." Ballon recalled stripping 200 years of paint off of windows in those houses in Ireland with a blow torch. "The whole lilt of that [monologue] came from living there."

 

MassLive.com December 10, 2006

by Kelsey Flynn

Your Stories Northampton on MassLive.com plays host to a lot of different writers. Some are published authors. Others are published only on this citizen journalism site. But recently, the bar was raised to include award-winning writers with this contribution from Jessamyn Smyth, "Local Writer Honored in Best American Short Stories 2006: Jessamyn Smyth's Pushcart Prize nominated short story 'A More Perfect Union' (American Letters and Commentary, Issue 17) has been listed as one of the '100 Distinguished Stories of 2005' in the Best American Short Stories 2006 anthology."

A prestigious distinction to be sure, especially when you read further and discover with whom she shares this year's list: Dorothy Allison, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, to name just a few. According to Smyth's post in the Local News section of Your Stories Northampton, the Best American series selects its winning writers from periodical publications in the preceding year.

I contacted Smyth to find out more about this local writer and her winning story. A native of Amherst, Smyth now splits her time between the Pioneer Valley and southern Vermont and New Hampshire. She described what it was like to come of age in the Connecticut River Valley, "It was a great place to grow up in the Seventies and early Eighties. The Five Colleges always made for an influx of new people, ideas, and creative energies each academic year, but in those days the town came to a peaceful standstill every summer. The Dead Mall was alive (and new). Route Nine in Hadley was still mostly dairy farms. It was crazy but largely safe, open, vibrant, international, and a perfect blend of country and seasonal mini-city. I feel lucky."

When I asked her about "A More Perfect Union" she became less descriptive. As a writer and a teacher, Smyth teaches writing at Keene State College and the University of Pennsylvania's Writer's Conference, she said summarizing plots for fiction is a nightmare. But she eventually relented and relayed this, "I wrote the story, as I write most things, as a carefully crafted blur between the internal and external, personal and political, 'fact' and fiction. It's about the tensions between love and injury, solitude and community, hope and despair, in contexts both individual and global. And some dogs." She sure knows how to write a teaser.

Smyth becomes loquacious again and yet definitive when I ask her about what motivates her as a writer. "Necessity," she begins, "because doing anything else, as George Orwell said in 'Why I Write,' is 'outraging my true nature,' so if I want to be able to get up in the morning, I have no choice but to write." And then she proceeds to rattle off a list of other impetuses, "Political desperation. The fact that nothing else makes me as happy. Bearing witness. Genetic destiny. Compulsive truth-telling. A hedonistic relationship with words. Mythic impulses both Classical and invented. A love of well-crafted things. The tantalizing possibility of saying what I meant to. The belief that good writing effects visceral transformation."

This is not Smyth's first recognition as a writer but it is no less significant. "Writing is many things, but above all, it's communication," she said. "So seeing this story live outside my own head means it's communicating successfully, and that feels good. Having it nominated for The Pushcart Prize [the best of the small press] could have been a perfectly happy ending for the story, and I thought it was. To see it further noticed in this collection - alongside the efforts of so many other writers whose work I admire, respect, and cherish - means worlds to me."

The Brattleboro Reformer: Entertainment April 27, 2006


BRATTLEBORO -- The sound of Erik Lawrence's Chinese bamboo flute floats over a kitchen table and under the mellifluous voice of poet, musician and Williams College professor Cassandra Cleghorn, reading "No Smoke, No Wires" -- "At the time it just seemed like a really good idea to keep it close, carried low in the sling of my meeting fingers."

Leo Hwang, musician, writer in many genres and dean of humanities at Greenfield Community College, blends his new upright bass into the mix and reads "Water Brushed on Newsprint" -- "Riding cross saddle behind, her hair is a fast stain of ink on the city at this hour. Blood thins, and flows evenly across the horizon -- She becomes a momentary stone monument, the calligraphy of evaporate shadow."

Pushcart Prize-nominated prose writer, poet, playwright Jessamyn Smyth, whose new production company, Basilisk, is behind this collaboration, wants to know if people are into mixing other forms with the poetry.

"How about an animal transformation micro-fiction?" she asks. "Do it," they say.

Lawrence both sets and keeps pace on the bamboo flute as her narrator turns into a buck rubbing antlers on giant maple trees: "We strip the velvet; our bones blind the night with their brilliance."

"Cool," someone says when they finish. "You should read that one at the show."

The show in question is "Real Basilisks," which runs May 4, 5 and 7 at The Church at the corners of Main and Grove streets.

The first half of "Real Basilisks" will be music improvised by Erik Lawrence for the writing of award-winning writers Cleghorn (The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner), Hwang (Glimmer Train, The Massachusetts Review) and Smyth (American Letters and Commentary, "For Here or To Go: Stories From the Service Industry").

Lawrence plays saxophones and flutes and has recently played or recorded with the Levon Helm band, Branford Marsalis, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Chico Hamilton, Emmy Lou Harris, Joan Osborne, the Neville Family and others.

In addition to his rigorous performance schedule, he also teaches at Williams College and The Putney School. Lawrence says these writers and their work are inspiring. "The music and words weave together with hypnotic effects. Senses overloaded, the audience is transformed."

Lawrence and Smyth have invited percussionist Bob Weiner to join the show. A lifelong student of deep music from around the world, Weiner has played and recorded with masters including Bob Moses, Klezmer master Andy Statman and Gabrielle Roth, as well as co-authoring definitive books on drumming and Afro-Cuban rhythms.

The second half of the show will be Smyth's newest play, "Jenny Haniver," a tragic romance in three short acts. Smyth says the play uses the metaphor of the Jenny Haniver to explore the nature and consequences of choices people make.

"A Jenny Haniver was a juvenile manta ray or skate pickled, bottled, and sold in medieval markets as a 'real basilisk' that could ward off evil and bring good luck, passion and protection," Smyth says. "I was interested in exploring how people behave when they are confronted by impossible choices between the 'real' and 'false,' the mythic and mundane -- particularly when whatever choice they make will carry enormous costs. I ended up with monks, martial arts, movie stars, unconsummated passions and gross things in jars: what more could you ask?"

"Jenny Haniver" stars Heather Abbott, George Adair, Kevin Cline, Ariana Ferber-Carter, Daniel Greycloud Jacob, Karina Morehead and Marcia Schuhle, area actors whose performance experience ranges from many shows to being onstage for the first time.
"Putting a play this complex into the hands of non-professional actors can be challenging for everyone," Smyth says, "but I believe community theater creates an opportunity take interesting risks that more mainstream theater no longer allows. The actors have worked hard, and this is what I want Basilisk Productions to be about -- making multi-genre performances happen with available resources, combining skill levels so everyone learns from each other constantly, and giving audiences something completely fresh."

Tickets for Real Basilisks at The Church are $10 at the door, reservations are recommended; email basiliskpro@aol.com with the name and number of tickets needed. The show starts at 8 p.m. on Thursday, May 4, and Friday, May 5, and there is a matinee at 1 p.m., on Sunday May 7.

(IMAGE COURTESY OF HALBAFFEN)

The Valley Advocate November 4, 2004

by Daniel Oppenheimer


Jessamyn Smyth's new one-act play, The Importance of Being Wild , is a tribute to playwright Oscar Wilde. It´s also, I suspect, a bit of a tribute to male model epic Zoolander . In particular, there´s a touch of the campy genius of the Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson pose-off in the following quote-off between John Ernest, the earnest medievalist, and Androgyne Epiphanes, the omnisexual gender theorist, as they vie for the attention of the lovely Gwen:

John : Wilde said, I can resist everything except temptation. You are my temptation, Gwen. He said: We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. You are my stars.

Andy : He also said: A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

John : I seem to have heard that observation before It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.

Andy : I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

Smyth´s play, which crams all the romantic, frantic, ironic action of a Wilde play into 45 minutes, is one-third of an evening of one-acts at the Shea Theatre in Turner´s Falls, a restored 1920s movie theater. In one sense it's homage to Oscar Wilde, says Smyth, but it's completely modern in context and content.

Daily Hampshire Gazette November, 2004

Q&A
Jessamyn Smyth writes, produces, and directs for Naked Theatre, a low-frills, high-concept company that has been reinventing Thursday nights at a Northampton bar. Her latest play, ''The Importance of Being Wild,'' opens this weekend at the Shea Theatre in Turners Falls in a showcase of romantic comedies rounded up by Michael Fleck of the Country Players. ''Crazy in Love: PG-14'' is the name of the evening.

Smyth lives across a bend in the Connecticut River from the handsome old theater. Along with Smyth's play, about a ''disastrous dinner party with several happy endings,'' the night offers tales of new love (''First Love,'' by Murray Schisgal and directed by Amanda Percival) and a portrait of a first romantic encounter (''Date With A Stranger,'' by Cherie Vogelstein and directed by Fleck).

Smyth directs her own ensemble comedy, which she pegs as a tale of ''manners, gender roles and romances gone terribly awry.''

Meantime, she is working on a novel, a collection of essays and a volume of poetry called ''Body of Work.'' She holds a master's degree from Goddard College, was a recent grant recipient of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont and teaches English at Greenfield Community College.

- LARRY PARNASS


Q :What has your ''Naked Theater'' work taught you about the meaning of ''ensemble''?

A: Working in a large group of talented people both humbles and ennobles everyone involved. I often ask actors to access the part of themselves that is the least wounded and the most powerful; given close attention to their beauty and strength, people will almost always rise to an expectation of excellence. Actors filter my language through their bodies and experience, show me things I didn't even know I'd written, and make my work bigger and more vibrant. The reciprocal generosity involved in theater is astonishing, on every level of production.

Q: Your forthcoming essay collection is called ''Real Femmes Aren't Afraid to Get Their Hands Dirty.'' Isn't writing a fairly clean trade?

A: Even if it is, being human often isn't. ''Real Femmes...'' will be in part a tribute to the history of marginalized women who have been willing to live in the trenches for whom and what they love, and in part a challenge to ridiculous, hostile, and profoundly boring notions of what it means to embrace stereotypically ''feminine'' attributes in the interest of consciously subverting them. It will also be a funny, sexy, smart book that knows how to climb trees, bandage wounds and change the world.

Q: You've been examining gender roles in your plays. Is this a playwriting theme for the long haul?

A: Yes. I find poking at power dynamics - sometimes gently, sometimes with a very large stick - both a good time and a necessity as a thinking, feeling, human being. Shape-shifting of all kinds holds great fascination for me, and can work as complex metaphor. The stage has always been a mirror for society, and apparently I'm of the Euripides camp when it comes to issuing fairly direct challenges with that reflection. In my prose, people often turn into animals, but I find those sorts of transformations a bit hard to stage on a budget.

Q: Does your dog resent being called Gilgamesh?

A: Of course not. It is his due, as a Great Hero. It is possible, however, that he merely tolerates some of his other nicknames, ''Gillyrumptious'' in particular.

''Crazy in Love: PG-14'' will be performed Friday and Saturday and Nov. 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls. To reserve tickets, call 863-2281 and press 1. Tickets will also be on sale at the World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield and at the door: $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and students Grade 12 and below. ''The Importance of Being Wild'' stars Heather Abbott, Al Clement, Kelsey Flynn, Laura Patrick, Rowena Rantanen, Judy Rodriguez, Marcia Schuhle, Marvin Shedd and Sue