Two theatrical teams on the mid shore have joined forces and their new production platforms modern original theater on this joint ballot.
You are listening to Off the Record with Stephen Philip Harvey, where we sit down and talk to a variety of musicians on today's music scene.
Today we're sitting down with et Wilford. He's a stage director that has been active on the Eastern shore for 18 years. During our chat, he reflected on the Shore's community theater scene.
I keep being surprised by how much of a gold mine of talent we have around here. There's a lot of really talented actors and they keep popping up. You see them over in Easton High and the Cambridge-South Dorchester high schools, like,you see them. Then you run into them again like six, seven years later, and they are still game to be in productions and they're still, if not even more, talented.
There is also a really nice offering of talent of people who have never tried theater before. They're like, they just moved to the area and they're like. “Oh, I did it once 20 years ago and it was a lot of fun.” But then you get married, you have kids, all the excuses to not engage in your extracurricular activities and when they find time to do it.
There are people my age, there are people 10 years older than me. There are people 30 years older than me that are just amazingly talented for one reason or another, and they all wound up here. And so, um, I'm very lucky that I've never really hurt for talent and that I have been able to try a lot of different styles of production with a lot of different kinds of talented people.
He's one half of a new theater venture called Groove Factory, which is presenting their first production 53% of April 16th through 19th in eastern Maryland. He gives a background to the place plot without giving away a hundred percent.
I would say the factory before we came along, or even still today, the factory is largely run like a woman-owned business. So I picked an all women's cast script, sort of as like a tribute to the factory's history. And what the, what the play is about is… it's three scenes. It's the same actors, but they play different characters in every scene. And all I'll tell you is what happens in the first scene. The first scene is a bunch of women who voted for the 45th president of the United States, and this is immediately following the election results of 2016. So, the title comes from 53% of an article that, that said 53% of white women, you know, pushed the 45th president into victory.
One might think modern theater to be solely left leaning, but Wilford warns that the thesis of the script reaches across the aisle for independent inspection of the modern American.
It looks at conservative voters. It looks at liberal voters. It looks at male and female voters, even though it's an all women cast. So that's all I'll tell you because it goes in directions that you do not expect. And reading this, reading this for the first time was such a joy ride. But, um, I would say really the big critique is no matter what your political ideology is or where, where on the spectrum of issues you vote on, what the play is really about is the danger of living in an echo chamber. Whereas like what do these conversations sound like when the only people we talk to and listen to and take advice from is people who think, look and act just like us.
This was Off the Record, hosted by me, Stephen Philip Harvey, a Delmar Republic Media production. For more information on the Groove Factories production of 53% Of visit thefactoryartsproject.org. To hear more Off the Record interviews or to listen to other original segments like this. Visit delmarvapublicmedia.org.
