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LUNA TEEN SUMMER CONSERVATORY
presents MIDDLETOWN by Will Eno
AUG 4-AUG 6 TICKETS: Tickets are available here; suggested donation is $10.
Luna Stage’s Teen Summer Conservatory celebrates its
fifth season this year. Over the course of four weeks, students
engage in a conservatory-style training program culminating in a
public performance on Luna’s MainStage. The experience encourages
teens to forge a meaningful connection to theatre and engage with the
community. This year's conservatory production will be Middletown by
Will Eno, running August 4-6.
The production offers a rare opportunity for students to
tackle challenging and thought provoking artistic material. Described
as “a deeply moving and funny play exploring the universe of a small
American town,” Middletown toes the line between the realism of an
American classic like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and the absurdity of
playwrights like Samuel Beckett, giving students the opportunity to
leap into the current of the contemporary American Theatre in an
exciting way.
For director Sean Dougherty, the choice of Middletown
was based on both artistic and learning goals, touching on the core
tenets of theatre education and its connection to student growth:
“From beginning to end, this is a learning opportunity for these
kids. The victory for them (and me) will be in the discovery of how
intentional application of their whole selves reveals more questions
than answers, but in turn inspires curiosity and the joy of
investigation.”
“So much of our lives happen to us,” Dougherty continues
“If we can learn to create characters that ‘do,’ we can perhaps learn
to participate more in our creation of self, be it onstage or in
life…It is a play that affords young actors chances to draw from
their lived experiences AND project themselves into imagined
experiences and firm points of view divergent from their own, so that
they may learn how to apply themselves to ‘walking in someone else's
shoes,’ while making those shoes feel like their own.”
For the whole team, taking on a newer play like
Middletown is full of unique challenges, but also unique advantages.
“I like to find a fairly contemporary play that the young artists are
unlikely to have seen or read before so that they may come to it
freshly, with no roadmap or feeling of a ‘right’ way to do it,”
Dougherty explains.
Luna Stage is proud to offer sliding scale tuition for
participants in the education programs, as part of their long-held
commitment to equity and to ensuring that the entire community has
access to live theatre and arts education. Performances of Middletown
will be held Friday and Saturday 8/4, 8/5 @ 7:30 pm, and Sunday 8/6 @
2pm, at Luna Stage, 555 Valley Rd, West Orange, NJ 07052.
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