WordStage Presents WINTER WORDS at the Aright Chapel
"Thy breath be rude," William Shakespeare famously told winter in "As You Like It," invoking a common complaint about the season: winter is cold, windy, bleak, awful. Five centuries later, poets have much the same complaints.
The performance of "WinterWords" takes place on Friday evening, December 4th at 7:30PM at the Wright Chapel in the Lakewood Presbyterian Church - 14502 Detroit Avenue at Marlowe in Downtown Lakewood. An informal reception will follow the performance. The Wright Chapel is ADA accessible.
Winter's metaphors often include its stillness, its sense of silence and darkness, a season of hibernation, a season where everything dies a little. The falling snow is a "poem of the air," wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, where the "troubled sky reveals the grief it feels."
Although the long, freezing winter nights and the crisp winter days tend to inspire harsh feelings among the people who endure them, not all poets see winter as a bleak and lifeless season. In Robert Frost's "Dust of Snow," a crow's movements cause snow to dust the speaker passing under a tree, and this dust "Has given my heart / A change of mood / And saved some part / Of a day I had rued." For other poets, the severe winter weather is a chance to speak in defiance of nature.
Winter weather also provides many poets with an excuse to turn away from outdoor pastimes and instead to concentrate on renewing and affirming their human relationships. The poem "Now winter nights enlarge" by Thomas Campion, for example, celebrates human warmth amidst chilly weather.
Many poets see winter as a fact of the landscape they call home, infusing it with nostalgia. Still others celebrate winter and the joys of the holidays and good cheer it brings.
WordStage's "WinterWords" is a pastiche of all these and more by some of our greatest poets and storytellers: from Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman and many more. Also included are Folk Tales from the Inuit, Native American, Norwegian and Middle European traditions. The texts, read by WordStage Company members Marci Paolucci and Tim Tavcar will be augmented with glittering musical selections the season inspires played by violinist Mary Beth Ions and pianist Patrick Wickliffe.
For more information about this and future WordStage performances, please visit our web site at www.wordstageoh.com or call us at 216-712-6926.
Videos
