The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Outreach set for play about fear
Long Wharf teams with Sandy Hook Promise
It’s not enough for regional theaters such as Long Wharf to produce plays that speak to life outside their doors. They select plays that relate directly to their immediate community, in part, through various outreach programs.
At Long Wharf Theatre, it’s the job of Community Engagement Manager Elizabeth Nearing to unite the citizens of Greater New Haven in awareness and activism through its production of Julia Cho’s “Office Hour.”
“The biggest way I look at it,” said Nearing over coffee downtown last month, “my job is to connect the work that’s on stage with what’s happening in New Haven. It’s building those bridges, those connections.
“That takes shape in two different ways. One is long-term partnerships that last a year or more,” Nearing said, citing New Haven Public Library and IRIS (Integrated Refugee and Immigrant services) as two current, mainstay partners.
“The other part is picking two shows a year that resonate most deeply with New Haven and doing a series of programming around them,” she said. “How can we highlight the works and have this plug into a network of things?”
For this production, Long Wharf Theatre is partnering with Sandy Hook Promise to offer a series of discussions and programs centered around “Office Hour,” which runs from Wednesday through Feb. 11 on Stage II. (We’ll have more on it then.) Cho sets her play in a university where a creative writing instructor, like her colleagues and the rest of her students, attempts to deal with an enigmatic student whose bizarre writing, ominous appearance and awkward silence terrify all. The play, Nearing said, is essentially about fear and how we handle it.
“Every character in the show is deeply afraid,” Nearing said, adding that Long Wharf also is working with Connecticut Medical Health Center for this production. “The big, clear fear that is addressed is: Is this person I’m in the room with dangerous? What is the profile of a shooter? What do you do with this fear? What does the teacher do with this fear?
“Lisa Peterson, the director, said this and I’ve become very attached to the phrase: ‘How do you go about being a person in a world where guns exist?’ It’s not a play so much about the gun, but rather trying to be human in a world like that.
“It’s a play that really taps into the culture of fear in society,” said Nearing, who said that Long Wharf’s May production of “Crowns” is the second show singled out for similar outreach treatment. “That’s something that’s so close to home. I know a lot of people are still wrestling with trauma in Newtown, and Sandy Hook Promise has done some pretty amazing work in terms of building empathy and compassion in preventative measures.”
Sandy Hook Promise is a national, nonprofit organization based in Newtown whose mission is to prevent gun violence (and other forms of violence and victimization) before it happens through education and mobilizing youth and adults on mental health and wellness programs that identify, intervene and help at-risk individuals. Several Newtown community members, including Mark Barden and Nicole Hockley, two parents who each lost children in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, founded it.
Some of the outreach activities born of the partnership with Sandy
Hook Promise include talkbacks after performances. Earlier this month Long Wharf hosted its Educators’ Laboratory in association with the theater’s Student Theatre Series, which is dedicated to bringing student audiences from all over Connecticut to the theater. This ED LAB focused on the themes of “Office Hour” and featured The Connecticut Center for Nonviolence teaching Kingian Nonviolent Conflict Resolution through improvisation, music and visual arts components. Sandy Hook Promise gave a brief presentation of its materials at the workshop.
On Friday at 7 p.m, Long Wharf will also host Creative Exchange, a forum to share ideas with members of the theater’s education department and other leaders in youth programming. Representatives from Sandy Hook Promise will again participate to discuss the innovative work they do to prevent gun violence.
Other events include a story slam on the subject of feeling like an outsider on Jan. 22 at Ives Main Library and a conversation on community resilience at Stetson Library on Jan. 31 (visit longwharf.org and sandyhookpromise.org for more information on related events).
Naturally, Long Wharf’s outreach endeavors will benefit the theater by cultivating new patrons and engaging current ones. Sandy Hook Promise hopes to create a bigger presence in the Elm City.
“As a Connecticut organization, they have a big footprint in Newtown and not (in) many schools in New Haven,” Nearing said. “It is one of the biggest school districts in Connecticut, so getting to reach more people is important.”
Nearing said that nothing would please her and her colleagues in the education department more than for “people to come to a panel discussion at a library and see the show, and have a conversation out of it.
“Seeing a show is a shared experience people can have,” she said, “and if that can act as a launching pad to activate conversations about what we can do to build community resiliency throughout New Haven, not only in school violence, but in all manners of violence, that would make me happy.”