American Page to American Stage: New, Classical Play Festival at Tennessee Shakespeare Company

AMERICAN PAGE TO AMERICAN STAGE: NEW, CLASSICAL PLAY FESTIVAL curated by Dan McCleary on the Tabor Stage Readings/Staged Readings run-times: 60-90 minutes, including any intermission, followed by a discussion with the adapters March 12-13 and March 19-20, 2027

Sponsored by ARTSmemphis and James R. Humphreys

Memphis becomes the first artistic launch city for a new play festival that will annually curate classical American literature for stage adaptation to plays. This inaugural year features six readings/staged readings in early development and a rare opportunity for you to see how plays are created, to provide feedback, and then track their progress to professional stage maturity.

Friday, March 12 at 7:30 pm: richard WRITE! adapted from Richard Wright’s Black Boy and performed by Darius Wallace

In Wright’s 1945 autobiography, a man born burning with the wish to become someone worthy struggles to survive the Jim Crow South. He tries every cure the world offers for the disease of being himself, discovering along the way that his rare gift was always the burning love of words. Wright’s American story from Natchez to Chicago offers an authentic voice still refusing to be silenced.

Saturday, March 13 at 4:00 pm: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, newly adapted by Tim Hotchner based on the stage adaptation by A.E. Hotchner and Tim Hotchner

Santiago has come home beaten, with a skeleton lashed to his skiff. He conjures the sea from memory, the boy nearby acting as love and longing on both sides of the voyage. And underneath: a great writer’s reckoning with endurance, loss, and the fear of being finished. Hemingway asked trusted friend A.E. Hotchner to adapt his story to the stage. He did so very late in life, with his son Tim, who now re-imagines the epic for one man in one room on one night.

Saturday, March 13 at 7:30 pm: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, adapted by Nena Martins

Gilman’s 1892 Gothic horror short story is regarded as a landmark of feminist literature. Her narrator is placed on a “rest cure” for a “nervous depression,” following the birth of her child. She is forbidden to write. But write she does, in journal entries of precision and imagination that both animate her room into a fever and explore misogyny within the medical field that still begs for revisiting.

Friday, March 19 at 7:30 pm: The Awakening by Kate Chopin, adapted by Paula Cizmar

In 1899, two decades before women could vote, Chopin wrote a visionary and scandalous novel that challenged the way women think of their lives, bodies, and connection to nature. Set in a prim and proper age, Edna Pontellier casts off the role of obedient wife and mother in New Orleans as she allows the sensuousness of the Gulf Coast sea, sky, and sultry breeze to work their magic.

Saturday, March 20 at 4:00 pm: Flame: Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay adapted by Gay H. Hammond

Weaving the verse, prose, and imagination of the 1923 Pulitzer-winning Millay, this piece offers a compelling dreamscape of wonder and yearning. In concert with iconic imagery, the poet’s words embody both our inner and outer worlds with lyricism and a biting wit.

Saturday, March 20 at 7:30 pm: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville and Song of Myself by Walt Whitman adapted and performed by Dan McCleary

In the literary family tree, there is Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, then arguably Melville and Whitman. Born the same year (1819) and dying within months of each other, the two American sensualists create and question their American God in prose and poems, from land and sea, in obscurity and in fame. Here, their ineffable tomes are twinned in poetic kinship and cosmic brevity.

Note: Titles/personnel/schedule subject to change, with notice.