Guilford Center Stage will stage two productions, in the spring and fall of 2024, at Broad Brook Community Center in Guilford. These will be the 12th and 13th shows since the group was founded in 2015, and both feature the work of Vermont playwrights.
On the first weekend in May, Hardwick playwright Marc Considine's Love Lost Diaries will be staged, directed by Julie Holland of Guilford. Considine is a science teacher at Hazen Union School in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. He is coach of the school's ambitious Drama Club. It was for his student actors that Considine wrote this play, which was the ensemble's entry in a regional drama festival in the late 1980s.
Director Holland has appeared or stage-managed 10 of the theater group's productions. She says, "Love Lost Diaries is a bittersweet story of a lifelong marriage that could have been so much more loving than it was, if only the couple had communicated their feelings to each other." The couple's history is revealed through diaries discovered by a group of high school students.
Auditions for Love Lost Diaries will be Saturday, Feb. 10, from 1 to 4 p.m., and Monday, Feb. 12, from 5 to 8 p.m., upstairs at the Broad Brook Community Center in Guilford. The facility is fully accessible, with an elevator to the upstairs.
On Oct. 25–27, Guilford Center Stage will present its first revival of a previous production: Broad Brook Anthology, by Guilford poet Verandah Porche. The work is a play for voices, consisting of recollections by Guilford elders, collected by Porche in collaborative writing sessions from 2006 to 2009, and first presented as part of the Guilford 250th anniversary in 2011. Guilford Center Stage gave the second performances in 2018.
Directed by Michael Fox Kennedy of Brattleboro, the play features projected photographs by Jeff Woodward, and music by Don McLean, accompanying readings by a half-dozen actors. Porche has added some new material for this production.
Guilford Center Stage has a mission to present place-based theater, with plays connected to the Grange hall, to Guilford, and to Vermont, and has performed plays by Vermont playwrights Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Michael Nethercott, Charles Henry, John Carroll, and Sinclair Lewis.
The company is a project of Broad Brook Grange, which is a partner of the newly-renovated Broad Brook Community Center. Last season, the first after a hiatus during the pandemic and building renovation, featured the classic Thornton Wilder play, Our Town, and Michael Nethercott's Haunts of the Season.
For more information, visit broadbrookcommunitycenter.org or facebook.com/GuilfordCenterStage.
This The Arts item was submitted to The Commons.