From my story in this month's issue of Preview Massachusetts:
“Throwing art” is how Jessamyn Smyth puts it. It’s about not waiting for grant funding or institutional support, but getting the work in front of people right there in your neighborhood, however you can.
When the Arena Civic Theater company took on a program of short plays and monologues by Smyth and Richard Ballon for its June slot, it collected two writers with a knack for this sort of throwing of the art. Smyth, now based in southern Vermont, not only wrote for, but produced two rounds of the Naked Theater project, staging one acts written on a deadline in The Elevens, a bar in Northampton. Ballon, who lives in Amherst, wrote a play for the gay/straight alliance of Easthampton High School and a six-part mini-series for Amherst Community Television.
And now, in a program of short plays and monologues, Smyth and Ballon are getting the community theater treatment. The Arena Civic Theater, one of three resident companies based at the Shea Theater in downtown Turners Falls, will be staging Smyth’s play Hedda Gabler Has Left the Building as well as two of Ballon’s plays, Benefit and Syphilis?, and two of Ballon’s monologues, “Spirited” and “Paddy McClintlock,” on June 8, 9, 15 and 16 at 8 p.m.
