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Dorothy J. Esser Foundation

Matinee Readers Theatre

66th Season 2008 - 2009
Open to the Public and Open Seating
Readers Theatres are FREE to everyone


DANTE’S INFERNO

 

PERFORMANCES: September 7, 14, 21, 2008 @ 2pm
Directed by Vanita Rae Smith
DANTE’S INFERNO is widely considered the central epic poem of Italian literature and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem’s imaginative of the Christian afterlife is a culmination of the medieval world-view as it developed in the Western Church. It opens on Good Friday, 1300 and Dante Alighieri has lost his path and wanders fearfully through the forest. Three beasts (a leopard, a lion and a shewolf) block his way. He encounters Virgil, the ghost who has come to guide him through Hell and eventually take him to heaven, where Dante’s beloved Beatrice awaits. Dante travels through the Nine Circles of Hell and emerges from Hell on Easter morning.

PARADISE LOST

by John Milton

PERFORMANCES: November 23, 30 & December 7, 2008 @ 2pm

Directed by Vanita Rae Smith
PARADISE LOST is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet. The poem concerns the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall of Man : the temptation of Adam and Eve by Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton’s purpose is “to judstify the ways of God to men” and elucidate the conflict between God’s eternal foresight and free will. The protagonist of this epic is the fallen angel, Satan who appears as an ambitious and proud being who defies his creator, omnipotent God, and wages war on Heaven, only to be defeated and cast down. Milton found Christian theology lacking and tries to incorporate Paganism, classical Greek references and Christianity within the story.

GOD'S TROMBONES

by By James Weldon Johnson

PERFORMANCES: March 1, 8, 15, 2009 @ 2pm

Directed by Vanita Rae Smith
GOD’S TROMBONES is seven negro sermons in Verse written in 1927 by James Weldon Johnson. Reviewers celebrated the collection for its power and simplicity. He wrote many dialect songs for Broadway in conjunction with his brother John Johnson and musician Bob Cole.. This is possibly Johnson’s most critically acclaimed work. Critics noted the dignity with which the poem treats his subjects. Johnson, himself an agnostic, uses religious themes freely and shuns rhyme, meter and dialect style to evoke black religious fervor using only straightforward speech without dialect.

LEAVES OF GRASS

by Walt Whitman

PERFORMANCES: May 10, 17, 24, 2009 @ 2pm

Directed by Vanita Rae Smith

HEAR AMERICA SINGING with the poem of Walt Whitman. He was just as much of an innovator through his poetry as any of the inventors of his time. His worh was not only his poetry in Leaves of Grass, but also includes. more importantly, his shaping of the national character. Many consider his accomplishment to be the invention of a new kind of person: free, strong. vocal at ease with himself, learned yet unbiased against the illiterate, proud, friendly and honest - in short, American. He serves as an “illustration” of what an American was then, and what an American could be; his poem forms a blueprint for the potential success and failures of Americans in the future.