Studio Series

The God Committee

September 4 - 9

Co-Produced with St. John’s Episcopal Church

It’s a play that lacks heart … and doesn’t try to hide it. In fact, if Mark St. Germain’s The God Committee had lots of heart, it wouldn’t work. After all, the play is about a group of seven medical professionals going through the agony and drama of deciding which of four patients should receive the one heart they have to transplant. It’s 12 Angry Men meets ER. It’s intense. It’s thought provoking.

Coming from someone who started his career penning episodes of The Cosby Show and Buddies, The God Committee is unexpected. But Mark St. Germain didn’t jump right from penning mass entertainment to bringing medicine and morality to the stage. Previous St. Germain plays include Camping With Henry and Tom, a comedic revisionist interpretation of a 1921 camping trip Warren Harding, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison took together ; Out of Gas on Lover’s Leap; and Forgiving Typhoid Mary.

Perhaps St. Germain would have continued to let his sense of humor guide him if a friend’s father wasn’t put on the organ transplant list several years ago. With 85,000 people nationwide waiting for organ transplants and far fewer than 85,000 organs to go around, St. Germain saw firsthand how intensely dramatic the selection process was … and that perhaps he was the person to bring that drama to the stage.

Stones In His Pockets

September 11 - 16

Marie Jones’ Stones In His Pockets started with only two actors playing all 15 roles in the play out of economic necessity. Thirteen years since Stones’ budget first run in Belfast – and since winning many of Ireland’s and Britain’s top theatre awards, being nominated for three Tonys and ruling London’s West End for five years – the money is certainly there to hire additional actors, but the idea of ever doing so is long gone.

Stones brings a Hollywood film crew to a village in Ireland’s County Kerry to shoot a blarney-filled major motion picture. The film’s director might not find the area’s cows looking “Irish enough,” but decides to stay and film anyway, hiring locals as extras. Stones follows two of these extras, Charlie Conlon and Jake Quinn, with the actors who play these underemployed 30-somethings also playing the film’s starlet, the film’s director, a voice coach, a priest, a security guard, and several more characters hard to keep track of on paper but easily discernable through the actors’ changes in voice and mannerism. It’s part comedy, part an exercise in physical endurance for the actors and part warning to not get carried away by pipe dreams. (We’ll also warn audiences this play uses strong adult language.)

Belfast-born Jones didn’t just dream up Stones out of nowhere. An actress in addition to a playwright -- Jones played Daniel Day-Lewis’ mother in the movie In the Name of the Father -- she has seen firsthand what the Hollywood glitz and glamour machine can do to the small towns it invades. She swears Stones isn’t meant to spear a particular real-life movie or star.

Eleemosynary

September 18 - 23

We’ll start with first things first -- how to pronounce the title of this play: el-uh-MOS-uh-ner-ee. Chances are it’ll still take a few attempts before it rolls off your tongue, but, when it finally does, imagine how impressed your friends will be. Impress them even further when you tell them “eleemosynary” isn’t some made-up tongue twister but a real honest-to-goodness, it’s-in-the-OED-and-Merriam-Webster word (adjective) meaning charitable.

While boosting your vocabulary is a nice perk of catching this much lauded, starkly set, character-driven play, that wasn’t what playwright Lee Blessing had foremost in his mind. Blessing, who won a Tony Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer for his play A Walk in the Woods, instead seeks to examine the relationships between three remarkable and uniquely individual women; a young girl, her mother, and her grandmother. And if the young woman happens to win the national spelling bee along the way – any guesses as to the word she spells to win? – all the better.

While full of painfully true insights into familial bonds and sharp observations of the ties between mothers and daughters, Eleemosynary also has plenty of witty one-liners you’ll want to take home with you: “I have trouble with my memory … I can’t seem to forget.” Whether laughing or crying, you’ll most likely agree Eleemosynary demonstrates that simplicity is the glory of expression (that’s a Walt Whitman quote for those interested).

Come see us at the Walk Festival Hall in Teton Village