GUILFORD — Guilford Center Stage continues into its third year with spring and fall productions of plays with connections to Guilford, continuing its mission to present place-based theater on the stage at Broad Brook Grange.
The season opens, not with a play, but with a square dance, which is a fundraiser for the theater project. The Falltown String Band, from nearby Bernardston, Massachusetts, with Bob Livingston, caller, from Middletown, Connecticut, will perform at the dance on Saturday, April 8.
Two of the band's four members are Marvin and Sue Shedd, who have acted in - or stage managed - all three Center Stage productions to date. Square dances are a tradition at the Grange hall going back nearly a century.
The spring production will be the premiere of a two-act play by Michael Nethercott of Guilford, an award-winning playwright whose one-acts The Lace Jury and Nocturne Titanica debuted at Guilford Center Stage last year.
The new play, Our Enemy's Cup, is a study of betrayal, loyalty, and accountability set in occupied France during the Second World War. Nethercott will direct these premiere performances of his work on the first weekend in May.
Following its success last year, the Guilford Center Stage season will also see a return of Stage and Stream, a weeklong theater camp, the third week in August, for 9-13 year olds, co-produced with the Guilford Free Library. The morning sessions will take place on the Center Stage, with mostly-outdoor activities in the afternoons based at the Library.
The season concludes on the traditional foliage weekend with To Their Appointed End: The One-Act plays of Jean Stewart McLean (1917-1963). The premiere of these plays, written nearly 70 years ago, is connected to Guilford through the playwright's son, Don McLean, co-founder of Guilford Center Stage, and they are performed in commemoration of the playwright's centenary.
The playwright, whose father was an Episcopal minister, set two of the plays in small-town church parishes similar to the one in which she grew up. William Stearns directs.