GREENFIELD, MA– On January 25, 2022 Silverthorne Theater Company Co-Founder David Rowland lost his battle with cancer. His loss has left a gaping hole in the cultural fabric of the Valley and is felt keenly by former Northfield Mount Hermon School students and faculty members and by Silverthorne company members with whom he worked to shape the organization.

In celebration of David’s creative genius and his invaluable contributions to the Company, a reading of his full-length play, After the Island, will be held on Sunday, April 10 at 3 pm in the Trinitarian Congregational Church Fellowship Hall on Main Street in Northfield. The gathering is offered free and open to the public. Reservations are requested and may be made at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/after-the-island-a-celebration-of-the-life-of-david-rowland-tickets-292671096127 . Donations in honor of David Rowland may be made at https://silverthornetheater.org/support/.

In 2012, David Rowland penned an imaginative and thoughtful sequel to Shakespeare’s famous last work The Tempest. In taking on the subject matter of one of the Bard’s most philosophical plays, Rowland portrays the familiar cast an indeterminate number of years after Prospero and Miranda leave the Island to return to Milan and the less than magical world they found there.

In the resonant rhythms of iambic pentameter, we meet an older Duke, Miranda and Fernando; Stephano and Trinculo reprise their drunken scheming; and Ariel returns to advise Prospero and set in motion re-connections and new beginnings. Caliban completes his transformation from semi-beast to conscious human, renewing hope in the eventual reclamation of civilized man through reason and empathy.

Following his 2013 retirement from 35 years teaching Theater and directing student productions at Northfield Mount Hermon School, Rowland and STC co-founder Lucinda Kidder pooled their resources and skills to create what has become the Valley’s premiere small professional theater company.

This reading celebrates Rowland’s long and productive career as an actor, director, teacher and playwright. Without his inspiration, Silverthorne Theater would never have existed. Anyone wishing to send messages of appreciation of David’s life and work may do so to [email protected] .

Silverthorne Theater Company is undergoing an exciting transition! Our Co-Founder and Managing Director LUCINDA KIDDER is handing over the reins of leadership to Interim Managing Director ALISON BUTTS.

Following the birth of the Company in 2014, Lucinda took on the job of shaping it to grow into its vision of a small professional theater dedicated to excellence of production and committed to local talent and the Valley arts economy. 

The skills accumulated over a life-time of theater practice and arts administration stood Lucinda in good stead, and she considers Silverthorne the shining capstone of her life’s work.

We are deeply grateful for Lucinda Kidder’s leadership, bringing the theater through its birth pangs, adolescence, and its healthy young adult years, made more complicated in the past two years!

JOIN US us as we celebrate the achievements of the last eight years by giving today!

Now is a chance to express your gratitude with a note to Lucinda for all she has brought to Silverthorne throughout the years. Though she is stepping down, her devotion to Silverthorne and all those who commit to the future of the company will never fade.

“I would be the first to acknowledge her invaluable work in bringing this small professional theater group to life in Greenfield. She has been not only a tireless leader in advocating for this type of local theater but an active and often hands-on proponent of lesser known shows like The Tattooed Man Tells All. Her contributions in every area of Silverthorne’s growth and success deserve our greatest appreciation and respect.” -Co-Founder David Rowland

Please consider sharing a memory, thank you, and well wishes to Lucinda Kidder.

Greenfield – As of December 31, 2021, Lucinda Kidder has retired from her position as Managing Director of Silverthorne Theater Company. She and former NMH theater teacher David Rowland co-founded the Company in 2014 as a two-show professional summer theater. Over the years it has grown into a year-round organization recognized for its excellence of production and mix of new plays and classics.

The founding of the Company was for Kidder the capstone of a life-long career in theater and the arts. A graduate of Northfield School in 1962 and Swarthmore College in 1966, she earned an MA in Theater Education from Emerson College in 1970. In 1984 she founded the Framingham Civic Stage, a year-round performing arts organization offering theatrical productions by and for adults and children, classes in theater, dance and acting for television.

 Following several years in arts management positions in eastern Massachusetts at such institutions as Framingham State University and the Peabody Essex Museum,  Kidder  moved back to the Valley in 1993 to work and teach at Northfield Mount Hermon School. Returning to graduate school after raising her three children, she earned an MFA in directing from UMass Amherst in 2002. This was followed by doctoral studies in Renaissance Drama and Multicultural Performance, also at UMass. She was a frequent presenter at theater and English literature conferences, often speaking about her work with Middle Eastern theater.  While at UMass, she initiated the Youth and Theater Program, working with Enchanted Circle Theater to develop a five-week intensive summer Shakespeare course for middle-school students in Holyoke and Springfield that remains part of the Holyoke Schools curriculum.

Throughout those years, she  worked with several Valley theaters, including the Country Players, Hampshire Shakespeare Company, South Hadley Community Theater, New Century Theatre, as well as teaching at Stoneleigh Burnham School, UMass and Mount Holyoke and developing ties with the greater Western Mass  theater community.

During her tenure as Managing Director of STC, the theater went through many changes, including shifting from its initial season in the Chiles Theater at Northfield Mount Hermon School to two summer seasons in the Sloan Theater at Greenfield Community College before taking up residence at the Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center in downtown Greenfield. Three playwriting contests resulted in production of world premieres of five full-length plays and fourteen short plays. Theater Thursdays, a new play reading series begun in 2019, still offers community members insight into the play writing and development process. She brought the theater through the first two years of the Covid pandemic without ceasing operations, and will advise new leadership as needed.

Kidder was a board member of the Greenfield Business Association, and represented the theater in the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce. She received the NMH Alumni Association’s Community Service Award in 2012 for her work with Silverthorne and the contributions it has brought to the region.

Plans for an interim Director for Silverthorne are underway as the Board initiates a search for a permanent replacement. Kidder will remain on the Board for now to help smooth the transition to new leadership. She is looking forward to spending time with her family and her garden, and exploring new activities.

SILVERTHORNE THEATER COMPANY PRESENTS READING OF NORTHAMPTON PLAYWRIGHT JAMES McLINDON’S WHEN WE GET GOOD AGAIN

Greenfield, MA –  Silverthorne Theater is proud to present the 2021 iteration of our Theater Thursdays play reading series, beginning on May 13, with When We Get Good Again by Northampton playwright James McLindon, directed by Mark Dean. This free event will be available to watch starting at 7:30 p.m. on the Silverthorne Theater Company YouTube channel. Following the reading, audience members are invited to attend a live Zoom discussion with the playwright, director and cast members.

When We Get Good Again Description

“… Tracy can’t wait to graduate and leave the rich kids at her prestigious school in her rear view mirror. In fact, she’s planning on graduating in three years, and only partly because that’s all the college she can afford. But there’s one problem: Tracy needs to keep her 4.0 GPA intact to get into a top law school to have even a chance of getting one of the few public interest jobs available to represent the poor. And the only way she can get all her work done by the end of the semester while holding down two work-study jobs is to take a short vacation from her ethics and buy a term paper from Hire Education. … When We Get Good Again is a play about integrity, excuses, and doing the right thing … as soon as you can figure out exactly what that is.”

James McLindon is a member of the Nylon Fusion Theater Co. in New York. When We Get Good Again won the Playhouse on the Square’s New Works @ The Works competition and premiered there in Memphis this past January, winning an Ostrander Theatre Award for Best Original Script. His short piece Choices  was one of the top plays in Silverthorne’s Short & Sweet (tiny) New Play Festival presented online in mid-February this year. In 2020, his full-length play, Distant Music, was streamed as the third in STC’s Theater Thursdays series.

The cast of When We Get Good Again includes Jen Campbell (Holyoke), Michael Garcia (Bondsville), Kevin Tracy (Holyoke) and Alexandra O’Halloran (NYC). Director Mark Dean (Northampton) is well known in Valley theater circles with his work as actor and director at the Majestic Theater in West Springfield, New Century Theatre, and lately for Silverthorne Theater. Campbell, Garcia and Tracy were recently seen in STC’s live Zoom production of The Waiting Room.

Silverthorne’s Theater Thursdays play readings program was launched in 2019 as a series of free rehearsed readings of new (or new to us) plays, followed by audience discussions. The purpose of the readings is to give a platform for new work to be heard, and when possible, to be able to give playwrights direct audience feedback.  It also provides Silverthorne a look at plays that we might consider fully producing in future seasons. This year’s 2021 series is supported in part by a grant from the Greenfield, Bernardston, Buckland, Conway, Deerfield, Northfield, and Shelburne Cultural Councils, local agencies which are supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.

SILVERTHORNE THEATER COMPANY PRESENTS “THE WAITING ROOM”: AN INTERACTIVE ONLINE PLAY IN TWO WORLDS

Greenfield MA – Silverthorne Theater is proud to present the World Premiere of the unique, written-for-Zoom play, THE WAITING ROOM, by Steve Wangh.  During each of the six live online performances, audience members will have chances to interact with the actors. The shows are scheduled for March 26, 27, April 2, and 3 at 7:30 pm and March 28 and April 4 at 3 pm.  Tickets are available at Eventbrite.com and on the theater web page at https://silverthornetheater.org/special-events.

THE WAITING ROOM is set in two worlds. On one level, it takes place in the Bardo – a liminal reality between one life and the next, where souls gather to await their next earthly assignment. On another level, it occurs on the Zoom platform, in which actors and audience members exist in separate “rooms” but share the fiction of being together. It will be performed by a diverse cast of Western MA actors under playwright Wangh’s direction in conjunction with veteran STC director Chris Rohmann.

Silverthorne’s production of THE WAITING ROOM continues its mission of engaging with artists bringing new work to the stage. In this case, the piece is ideally suited to current performance conditions. “At the time we started work on the play, live performance venues were still shuttered,” said STC producer Lucinda Kidder. “The Waiting Room enables live audience participation in a truly unique theatrical experience from any location!” The Company has launched several successful online performances throughout 2020, and it recognizes that it may be some time before patrons will feel comfortable returning to live productions.

THE WAITING ROOM reflects contemporary society in whimsical but often unsettling ways. Characters speak as the person they were when last on earth, but they may inhabit a body differently gendered or of different ethnicity or race. They enter and exit their Zoom rooms as they are called to be born in a new body. In the course of the play, actors and audience members meet up in Breakout Rooms for conversation and questions.

In its examination of the cycle of life and death, the play proposes a different take on mortality that will spark reflection and discussion among all ages and persuasions of theater lovers. It wipes away all personal and societal divisions to affirm the very essence of what it means to be a human as each new arrival departs to be born once more with a clean slate. Such a premise prompts the most basic of existential questions- as well as humorous reactions to the mixed bag of reassignments.

Residing in Brattleboro, Steve Wangh has been a playwright, director and teacher of acting throughout his highly successful career. He was associate writer for Emmy-nominated The Laramie Project, and penned the influential acting text, An Acrobat of the Heart, detailing the training methods of Jerzy Growtowski. He maintains his connections with New York University’s Experimental Theatre Wing as professor emeritus. He is the author of fifteen plays and was dramaturg for Moisés Kaufman’s Gross Indecencies: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.

The cast includes Kyle Boatwright (Amherst), Jen Campbell (Holyoke), Mark Dean (Northampton), Michael Garcia (Bondsville) and Kevin Tracy (Holyoke). Ethelyn Friend (New York) plays the unseen Stationmaster who oversees the Bardo. The technical director is John Iverson (Bernardston), assisted by Maggie Donovan (Mt Holyoke College).

Silverthorne shifts to online format for ‘tiny’ play festival

Short & Sweet (tiny) New Play Festival

from the GREENFIELD RECORDER

https://www.recorder.com/Silverthorne-shifts-to-online-format-for–tiny–play-festival-38839241

A safe space for healing

Survivors’ Voices: Works of Resilience Written and Read by Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse

from the GREENFIELD RECORDER

https://www.recorder.com/Survivors-showcase-38278080

SILVERTHORNE THEATER PRESENTS “HOLIDAY TALES FOR WINTER EVENINGS”

Greenfield, MA – Many of Silverthorne’s best-known actors have joined with STC friends and family members to record a series of evenings full of song, music and spoken word, Holiday Tales for Winter Evenings, scheduled for December 18, 19, and 20 starting at 7 pm on the Silverthorne YouTube channel.

Each evening will feature a different menu of pieces: holiday stories and songs for children; reflections on the season for adults; and traditional favorites for the whole family. The full schedule for each evening will be posted on our web site (https://silverthornetheater.org) under Special Events by December 15.

Thom Griffin serves as host for the series. Featured performers include Chris Rohmann, Stephanie Carlson, Myka Plunkett and Kyle Boatwright, Chris Devine and Rosie Caine, Rona Leventhal and Larry Picard. Also taking part are David Rowland, Penney Hulten, Kimberly Salditt-Poulin, John Reese, Heather Tower, Kackie St Clair and Lucinda Kidder. And there are guest appearances by Bryan Griffin and Nathan Carlisle.

Selections include A Child’s Christmas in Wales, The Grinch that Stole Christmas, A Visit from Saint Nicholas, Channukah in Santa Monica, The Snowy Day and many more.

The full schedule will be posted on the Silverthorne website and social media (Facebook and Instagram) by December 15. Patrons can join us for some or all of these free offerings.