Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Civic Ensemble will present a staged reading of Incident at Vichy by Arthur Miller. The reading will take place at on July 27th at 7:00pm at the Kitchen Theatre Company.

Incident at Vichy is about a group of men detained by German officers during World War II upon suspicion of being Jewish. As the men begin to understand why they have been detained, they begin to react with fear and anger, yet none try to escape. Incident at Vichy offers a view of why the Nazis were able to perpetrate the Holocaust for so long due to denial and complicity.

Performing the reading will be a cast of local theatre practitioners, including Arthur Bicknell, Theo Black, Greg Bostwick, Matthew Bretschneider, Rudy Gerson, J.G. Hertzler, Ci Herzog, Craig MacDonald, Steve Pacek, Mark Shanahan, Johnny Shea, Michael Trimm, Bruce Warren, and Jacob White.

Playwright Arthur Miller is considered one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century. In addition to Incident At Vichy, Miller wrote such classics as Pulitzer Prize-winner Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Price, The Crucible, and A View From The Bridge. Director Beth Milles is an Associate Professor at Cornell's Performance and Media Arts whose recent directing credits include Dead Man's Cell Phone (Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, RI), The Importance of Being Earnest (Trinity Rep) and Lazarus Disposed (Perishable Theatre).  Other work includes writer/director Tim Robbins and Adam Simon's Carnage for The Actor's Gang in Los Angeles.

When asked how the choice was made to do the play, Civic Ensemble's Associate Artistic Director Jennifer Herzog responded, "Personally, I wanted Civic to present this reading in an effort to represent Jewish history authentically, as a response to a growing anti-­Semitic climate in America and abroad." Herzog goes on, "Ideally, projects like this can help educate, enlighten, and motivate audiences to engage in dialogue about hate and intolerance in their community and beyond."

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