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Event
A Little Theater's Production of 'Hamlet' by Jean Battlo
A sophisticated New York director with a successful Off Broadway season under her belt reluctantly travels to West Virginia to direct Hamlet under the auspices of a grant for "under served regions." Only six people show up to audition: 23 year old Mona who has always dreamed of playing Ophelia, a coal truck driver whose single desire is Mona, two waitresses in their forties who have never been stage struck, 74 year old Hattie Johnson who has spearheaded the effort to see Mona get a crack at her dream, and the bank vice president who has been ordered to appear. Gathering in Hattie's Restaurant, this group perpetrates the most harrowing production of Shakespeare ever mounted. Some amazing costumes and merry mishaps ladle hilarity on top of sincere attempts to tailor Hamlet to this remarkable cast. The play is the thing, and though limp in quality, the production marches forward in tune to very real and deep human spirits bent on accomplishment. The result, a fractured, quixotic play, provides a fine example of realizing the impossible dream.
The entire play is set in Hattie's Restaurant in Kimball, WV, a ghost town of a once booming coal-mining town.
The time: August 1997.
Jean Battlo's Biography
Playwright, poet, essayist, and more, Jean Battlo is a writer of rare and exceptional talent, one with a deep appreciation and love of her home state and a gift for translating those feelings into the written word. The youngest child of Italian immigrants, drawn to Appalachia to work in the coal mines, Jean Battlo was born and raised in Kimball, a small town in McDowell County, West Virginia. She attended Marshall University, earning both a B.A. and an M.A. Battlo began her literary career as a poet, publishing two award-winning volumes of poetry Bonsai and Modern Haiku. She first attempted playwriting in response to a request from her communitypeople who wanted to form a local theatre group but could not afford the royalties charged by publishing houses for producing their materials. Though she had not even thought of writing plays before, Battlo agreed to try.
Like most writers, Battlo started with what she knewher people, her culture, her world. Her first plays, A Highly Successful West Virginia Business and Caves, are examples of the pride that is at the heart of mountain culture and the lengths mountaineers will go to survive and overcome the challenges of poor economic conditions. Similar characters appear in other Battlo works, including A Little Theaters Performance of Hamlet and The Morning Glory Tree. Battlo considers her work an ongoing effort to overcome and dispel the negative stereotypes about West Virginians and Appalachians in the mainstream American media These people are not caricatures, not mammy Yokums, not hillbilly stereotypes. These are people I live with. Theyre real. They watch CNN. They know whats going on in the world. They just havent lost touch with their roots.
Word spread quickly about the new playwright. In 1987, Battlo left her job with the McDowell County school system to spend two years as a Writer-in-Residence with the Beckley-based Theater West Virginia. While with the program, Battlo wrote two more plays Frog Songs and Shakespeare: Love in Stages (co-authored by Alma Bennett). Scenes from both plays were included in Linda Pinnells Getting Started in Theater (National Textbook Company, 1996).
Battlo later turned her playwriting focus to historical dramas. #8, a play about a Jewish family just prior to the beginning of Hitlers Holocaust, was selected as a finalist by Camel-Sea in 1990, as well as being optioned by Off-Broadway Stage Arts and being listed as a finalist in the Eugene ONeill National Playwrights Competition. In 1992, she was commissioned to write Between Two Worlds. The musical, which premiered at the Pearl S. Buck Home in Hillsboro, WV, was written to celebrate the centennial of the Bucks birth. Jean Battlo was later awarded a seed-grant from the WV Humanities Council to research the 1921 murder of Smilin Sid Hatfield for an outdoor drama intended to help bring tourists to the Hatfield-McCoy Trail in southern West Virginia. The result of that grant, The Terror of the Tug, premiered in the summer of 2000 with a performance at Landbridge, WV. The Terror of the Tug remains under the control of McArts, the McDowell County community arts organization, and is performed each summer in a specially-constructed outdoor amphitheatre.
Jean Battlo continues to live and work in McDowell County, West Virginia. She serves as the McArts artistic director as well as working with Theater West Virginia to teach workshops on playwriting. In 1998, Battlo established Globe Stage, a replica of Shakespeares Globe Theatre, in McDowell County. In additional to her many plays, Battlo has also published prose works of fiction and non-fiction, including a collection of Appalachian horror stories (Appalachian Gothic Tales).
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LocationThe LaBelle Theater (View)
311 D St, South Charleston, West Virginia 25303
South Charleston, WV 25303
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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