The Most Dangerous Woman
October 2014
Director: Barbara Guertin
Lighting Design: Robert Dookhran
Photography: Frank Bartucca
Stage Manager: Tasha Matthews
Featuring: Robbin Joyce as Mother Jones
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (1837-1930) was an Irish-American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent labor and community organizer. She helped coordinate major strikes and cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World. After her husband and four children died of Yellow Fever and her workshop was destroyed in a fire in 1871, she began working as an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. From 1897, at around 60 years of age, she was known as Mother Jones. In 1902 she was called “the most dangerous woman in America” for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, upset about the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a Children’s March from Philadelphia to the summer home of then president Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York.
A one-woman tour-de-force featuring Robbin Joyce in the role of Mother Jones
Facebook Review by Paul Kolas (Theatre Critic for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette):
Listen up everyone, who lives within driving distance of The Worcester Historical Museum, located at 30 Elm St. in Worcester, MA. I urge you to see a very special one-woman show this weekend. Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, was a pioneering crusader if there ever was one. Robbin Joyce brings her to brilliant, irascible life with a bravura performance that is as edifying as it is entertaining. Labeled “The Most Dangerous Woman,” Mother Jones was a schoolteacher and dressmaker who dedicated her life to organizing mine workers into defying the horrid working conditions imposed on them by avaricious mine owners, and later upending child labor laws in Pennsylvania mines and silk factories. Joyce inhabits this Irish force of nature with piquant wit, moral outrage, and mesmerizing tenacity. The Worcester Historical Museum is the perfect setting for a production that combines theater and history into an indelible experience, astutely directed by Barbara Guertin.
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (1837-1930) was an Irish-American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent labor and community organizer. She helped coordinate major strikes and cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World. After her husband and four children died of Yellow Fever and her workshop was destroyed in a fire in 1871, she began working as an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. From 1897, at around 60 years of age, she was known as Mother Jones. In 1902 she was called “the most dangerous woman in America” for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, upset about the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a Children’s March from Philadelphia to the summer home of then president Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, New York.
A one-woman tour-de-force featuring Robbin Joyce in the role of Mother Jones; directed by Barbara Guertin.
April 7 & 8 at the Worcester Historical Museum.
Streetcar Named Desire
production at Hanover includes shows for students
By Richard Duckett TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
Posted Apr 9, 2015 at 6:00 AM
Updated Apr 9, 2015 at 8:25 PM
Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” is studied worldwide in high schools and colleges.
You can discover a lot as you pore over the pages, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it was written as a play to be performed on the stage. Many Worcester Public Schools high school juniors have been reading a “A Streetcar Named Desire” since early in the school year and discussing subjects that emerge from it such as the state of the American dream. But the play will come into very immediate focus for 800 juniors when they see a live production of it by the 4th Wall Stage Company over the course of two morning performances today and Friday at The Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts in Worcester.
“I think it’s a brilliant idea that’s turned into a wonderful experience,” said Barbara Guertin, managing director of 4th Wall and director of the “Streetcar” production. The special performances are by an arrangement with Worcester Public Schools, The Hanover Theatre and 4th Wall. There will also be a public performance of “Streetcar” at the Hanover Theatre at 7:30 p.m. April 10, and then 4th Wall will move the show to one of its regular bases, the Singh Performance Center at Alternatives Unlimited in Whitinsville, for performances April 11, 12, 17, 18 and 19. The cast of 25 includes students from Burncoat Senior High School and Aimee Kewley, who teaches theater at Burncoat and has acted with 4th Wall and other local theater companies.
Written by Williams in 1947 (the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948), “A Streetcar Named Desire” has two of the most memorable characters in American literature — Blanche Dubois, a woman whose life is undermined by her romantic illusions, and Stanley Kowalski, Blanche’s brutish brother-in-law, who sets out to destroy her fragile world when she visits her sister Stella in New Orleans.
“Blanche is one of most complex characters ever written,” said Guertin. She could be said to represent a dissolving old word — a pretentious, but witty, relic of the Old South. Stanley, in contrast, a successful salesman, is a rising member of the industrial urban immigrant class.
“Stanley has this fabulous sales job. On the other hand, he’s completely unsophisticated,” Guertin said.
"A Streetcar Named Desire"7:30 p.m. April 10, The Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts, 2 Southbridge St., Worcester. Tickets: $25. (877) 571-7469; www.the hanovertheatre.org.
7:30 p.m. April 11, 17 and 18; 2 p.m. April 12 and 19. Singh Performance Center at Alternatives Unlimited, 50 Douglas Road, Whitinsville. $25; $22 students and seniors (65 and older).
For reservations call Barbara Guertin at (508) 951-2665 or e-mail to Barbara@4thwallstagecompany.org
The exchanges between Blanche and Stanley are memorable. “They get at each other,” Guertin said. However, “they’re just drawn to each other.” Regardless, it isn’t likely to end well.
Blanche is being portrayed by Jourdan Spruill (“Jourdan knocked my socks off” at her audition, Guertin said), and Sean Stanco (who can be seen in a recurring role in the final season of “Boardwalk Empire” on HBO) plays Stanley.
You can read the exchanges, but seeing Spruill and Stanco bring them to life will be another experience entirely, especially for some students in the audience who have never seen live theater before.
“Live theater is so much different than going to a movie or watching television,” Guertin said. “There are many scenes where actors come across and it’s shocking because it’s real-time in front of you. It has an impact.”
Phyllis A. Goldstein, English language arts curriculum liaison PreK through Grade 12 for Worcester Public Schools, said, “Live theater is something I believe everybody should experience.”
With the support of the Worcester Educational Development Foundation Inc. and other groups, Worcester Public Schools organizes visits for students in every grade to “the wonderful venues that we have in and around Worcester,” Goldstein said. Second-graders, for example, make a trip to Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Boylston. Grade 5 students have attended concerts at Mechanics Hall introducing them to American composers. For high school students, Worcester Public Schools has previously worked with The Hanover Theatre and a Shakespeare touring company to put on plays such a “Macbeth” for a different grade each year.
This year, Goldstein said, “We decided to change it around a little bit and decided to do an American play.” The English curriculum for 11th-graders focuses on American literature. Troy Siebels, president and CEO of The Hanover Theatre, suggested 4th Wall, which has staged American classics such as “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” and introduced Guertin to Goldstein.
“I think that this is a great community-school partnership,” Goldstein said.
“As both a teacher and an actor, I jumped at the opportunity to include my students into a professional production,” said Kewley. “They (Burncoat students) have also written a study guide that has been sent to other high schools, and are acting in the production alongside this stellar cast. I have seen tremendous growth in my students who are involved in this project...WPS and 4th Wall have been so gracious to allow this collaboration, which I am sure will be talked about for years to come.”
“This cast — it’s just a true ensemble,” Guertin said. “The Hanover staff is just so brilliant. Hopefully, this will be so successful we’ll do this every year.”
Guertin said that her re-reading of the play in preparing to direct the 4th Wall production led her to make some decisions that might surprise.
“I think people will say ‘I had no idea this was how it was written.’ This will be an eye-opener for people who think they know the show.”
The set, in the French Quarter of New Orleans with street vendors, musicians, dancers and lots of jazz in the background, is “going to be a complete feast for the eyes,” Guertin said.
At the performances for juniors (from every Worcester Public School and some alternative programs), “I do hope they’ll walk out at the end and say ‘I want to see more.’ It just takes one play to impact. That’s a lot of young minds we could turn into theater lovers or at least literary folks,” Guertin said.
Goldstein has already seen it at other live theater productions.
“I greet them on the way in,” she said. “And the kids thank me on the way out.”
Contact Richard Duckett at Richard.Duckett@telegram.com