Registration is now available for the one-man version of my play, Every Broom and Bridget--Emily Dickinson and Her Irish Servants and the rest of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival (May 3-5, 2013). I will be performing the play on Friday, May 3, 2013 at 2:30 pm in the Sophia Room, Hawthorne Hotel, 18 Washington Square W, Salem, MA 01970.
If you're interested in coming, you'll need to register for a spot at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival website (http://masspoetry2013.crowdvine.com/). Here are the steps--
1) You'll need to set up a profile (name and e-mail)
2) Go to the schedule for Friday, May 3 from 2:30-3:30 pm and click on the green square with a white cross in it next to Every Broom and Bridget--Emily Dickinson and Her Irish Servants.
3) Pay for admission ("Buy a Button") to this and all other events at the festival (May 3, 4, and 5)--$15 general admission, $7 seniors and students. Your name will then be on a list at the door of the Sophia Room at the Hawthorne Hotel (see above) on the day of the show. You should plan to get there 10-15 minutes early. The show will start at 2:30 pm prompt.
Go to the logistics page (http://masspoetry2013.crowdvine.com/pages/logistics) for information about public transportation to Salem from Boston, including commuter rail and MBTA bus. There is also information on parking.
I would encourage you to sign up as soon as possible. I intend to fill all the spots in advance, and the Festival events generally fill very quickly.
Hope you can make it!
Check out all the other exciting events at the Festival, including a performance by Doc Brown's Traveling Poetry Troupe on Saturday, May 4 at 11 am at the first floor of the Old Town Hall in Salem. I'll be performing a couple of my poems in that show.
Let me know if you have any questions. I hope to see you there!
Best regards,
Tom Daley
In
a letter to the author after the original performance of the play,
Judson Evans, director of the Department of Liberal Arts at the Boston
Conservatory, wrote,
By grounding Dickinson in a dense social context among the Irish
servants who surrounded her, you open up the layers and dimensions of
social imagination within her work that are denied by the conventional
image of Dickinson’s total interiority and reclusion. You allow her
poems to unfold new dimensions of social gesture, irony, and exchange.
You create an imaginative space in which Dickinson’s poems can be
dramatically spoken as complex authentic communication without this
seeming stilted or arcane. By presenting a posthumous Dickinson alive in
the multiple memories of the servants who surrounded her you avoid
reducing her to a poetic cliché and instead preserve the mystery and
otherness of her identity.
