Gloucester Stage to Present Lee Meriwether in Her Adaptation of THE WOMEN OF SPOON RIVER, 6/2-4

Gloucester Stage Company will present Lee Meriwether in her adaptation of THE WOMEN OF SPOON RIVER, June 2-4, 2012. The show is an intimate collection of female literary portraits by Edgar Lee Masters performed by Meriwether set in a small town in Illinois at the turn of the century.

Published in 1915, Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology is a collection of epitaph poems describing the lives of the inhabitants of the fictionAl Small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran - and still runs - near Masters' home town in Illinois. The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters providing accounts of their lives, losses and deaths. The poems were originally published in the magazine Reedy's Mirror.

In 1962, Charles Aidman adapted Spoon River Anthology for the stage, with folk songs (some traditional, and some original songs written by Aidman and Naomi Caryl), and this production premiered at Theatre West in Los Angeles and starred Betty Garrett and Joyce Van Patten in the two female roles. Understudying Garrett and Van Patten was Lee Meriwether. The following year, the show traveled to Broadway and has since been performed in thousands of productions around the world. In 2002, Theatre West mounted a revival of the show for its 40th anniversary, directed by Betty Garrett and Joyce Van Patten. This time, however, Lee Meriwether — the one-time understudy — now starred.

Having an affinity for both the show and the women of Spoon River, Meriwether often felt that Masters had given short shrift to the female inhabitants of his fictional town, Meriwether's website states. Of the over two hundred characters in Masters' collection, only a handful were women. Seeing an opporunity to give these women their due as well as to provide a challenge for herself as an actress, Meriwether set about adapting Masters' work, extracting nearly all of the female characters and presenting them in a one-woman show. Later, together with writer/actor/director Jim Hesselman, Meriwether discovered that by performing the women in a particular order she could create not only personal accounts of the women as individuals, but could also depict an overall picture of the life of women in general - both in terms of a particular period and place, but also in universal and eternal terms. The Women of Spoon River: Their Voices from the Hill premiered in May of 2010 at Indiana University Southeast, starring Meriwether and directed by Hesselman, with scenic and lighting design by Rebekkah Meixner-Hanks and original music by Kenneth Atkins. The show then enjoyed a run of several weeks at Theatre West in early 2011.

Visit http://www.gloucesterstage.com/ for more information