Word: jarcho
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last November, the annual Young Playwrights Festival in New York debuted Nursery by Julia Jarcho’03-’04, a play hailed in The New York Times as “Terrific stuff, stunning from a teenage writer.” Jarcho slides into the director’s chair as well for her latest production, The Highwayman, which will open today in the Adams Kronauer Space. The Highwayman is inspired by the Alfred Noyes poem of the same name published in 1907. (Jarcho notes that her play is inspired by, not adapted from, the poem...
...Jarcho discovered the poem “The Highwayman” through her grandmother, who had won an award as a girl in Puerto Rico for reciting the text. Deciding that it would work well as a theater piece, Jarcho set to work. “I don’t consider the play to be a version of the story. It’s much more a response than an attempt to render it,” the playwright explains. The poem focuses on Bess, a beautiful girl who tries to save the life of her beloved highwayman...
...Highwayman came to fruition last summer when Jarcho participated in the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Conn., where she was a writer-in-residence. “It sounds silly to say that I wrote the play in a month, but that’s all I had to do [at the conference].” Jarcho is a veteran downtown New York theater actress, and that world—where playwrights direct their own works and ask friends, including non-actors, to play roles—contributed to “my sensibility?...
Eschewing the customary audition process, Jarcho chose some actors whom she has used before and some theatrical novices. Sarah E. Porter ’03, who plays Bess, has been in two other Jarcho productions, and when the director asked her to come along for a third ride, says Porter, “I was thrilled. Julia’s writing is so smart. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s poetry set to motion.” Lisa C. Lightbody ’03 has no theatrical experience, but Jarcho says...
...cast members makes for some strange and hilarious moments during rehearsal. When Ezekiel W. “Zeke” Reich ’03, the eponymous Highwayman and a friend of Jarcho’s since childhood, messes up a line in a particularly odd way, he and Jarcho burst out laughing. After about thirty seconds, the rest of the cast looks at each other mystified. Finally, one actor admits “I don’t get it” and the rest of the casts nods in agreement. Later, Reich says that its not unusual...