items tagged with Playcrafters Barn Theatre

The Playcrafters Barn Theatre's current, holiday-themed family presentation Papa's Angels begins on a note - or rather, a bunch of notes - of incredible sweetness.

As the lights come up on scenic artist Bill Marsoun's lovingly designed playing area, we find ourselves outside a mountain cabin in North Carolina, circa 1935 - a place and time elegantly conveyed through the live, off-stage sounds of a jaunty fiddle solo. After a few beats, the musician walks into view. And if, like me, you don't peruse the cast biographies before the show starts, you're likely in for a shock, as the gifted fiddler - Morgan Williams - doesn't appear to be a day over 12.

See How They Run, currently being staged at the Playcrafters Barn Theatre, is described on the venue's Web site as "a classic farce of mistaken identity and slamming doors." But in actuality, only two parts of that three-part statement turn out to be accurate.

At last count, there were a whopping 46 area-theatre productions scheduled between September and December, and included among the titles are A Dog's Life, The Big Funk, Scrooge!, Don't Hug Me, and Mid-Life! The Crisis Musical. It's the season that my editor, Jeff, has been waiting for!

Area performer and radio-show host Shellie Moore Guy is slender in frame, and not particularly tall. Yet in the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's presentation of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, the actress -- in her role as matriarch Lena Younger -- projects such expansive love, pride, and strength of character that she appears larger than life. Lena's adult children, Walter Lee (Curtis Lewis) and Beneatha (Alysha McElroy-Hodges), may tower over her, but there's never any doubt that Guy's selfless, resolutely devout mother is the one in charge; she guides both her family and Hansberry's drama with an impassioned righteousness that would be mythic if it weren't so complexly structured, and so wonderfully human.

"Literally thousands of people have come through this building to perform on our stage," says Craig Michaels, past president of the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's board of directors. "But without demeaning or belittling any of the work that's been done here over the years, I was finding that I didn't feel the entire community was properly represented within our building, both on our stage and behind the scenes."