Rachel Viele and Sharyce L. McElvane in Magic Fingers, and Legal Tender.
Okay everyone, Legal Tender opens tonight, and I couldn’t be more excited, for Elizabeth whose stories everyone will see embodied by live performers, for the performers who have done some excellent work and whose commitment to the project has been superb, for the whole production team and their dedication to excellence.
I went into the project knowing that it was in many ways a grand experiment. To perform literature, and its “he said” “she said” exchanges, its thick description if you will, its lack of action and its focus on character–what could be more challenging.
What we’ve accomplished, however, is fabulous I believe. Each piece is different in its own way; each piece captures something wonderful about our humanity; each piece synthesizes the theatrical and the literary, but more importantly the human portrait of the central character with the expressionistic environment in which that person lives. Because each of us goes through life in many ways engaged in simple exchanges with the world; yet, within those simple exchanges, the threads that connect us to the world and to our personal histories reach far back, pulling on our values and our memories. Something about the vignettes presented in Legal Tender resonate with that thick fabric.
I hope you get a chance to see this show, and I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I enjoyed working with our team putting them together.
Tags: Legal Tender, live lit, performing knowledge, Prose-in-Performance, Sanctuary Theatre, theatre