Archive: Arts & Entertainment

November 13–21, the Cherry presents the English-language première of A Day by Québecoise writer Gabrielle Chapdelaine. This strange, funny, and tender new play received the Gratien-Gélinas prize for best new play of 2018. The Cherry's production of 'A Day' has already been featured in The New York Observer as one of “The Best Zoom Plays, Audio Dramas and Livestream Theater of Fall 2020!”

In A Day, four mysteriously connected characters guide one another through the obstacles large and small that make up an ordinary day. The play’s unexpected and ever-evolving structure lends itself beautifully to mixed video, and this production is created to stream live to audiences’ homes from the historic State Theater in downtown Ithaca.

Four live actors will each perform from a separate multi-camera green-screen booth on stage, their performances mixed in real time with recorded audio and video performances created by over a dozen other members of the Cherry Artists’ Collective. The combination will weave a surprising, touching and comic landscape of 24 seemingly ordinary hours.

A Day will stream live for five performances only. The production stars four Ithaca favorites:

Kitchen Theatre favorite Karl Gregory* (Santaland Diaries, Fully Committed, Hand To God, Buyer & Cellar, many others), returns to the Cherry after his eyeball-peeling performance with us in Testosterone. Jahmar Ortiz starred opposite Susannah Berryman in the Cherry’s On the Other Side of the Sea (and was Oberon in Ithaca Shakes’s Midsummer Night’s Dream). Erica Steinhagen* is an icon of the Hangar (Into the Woods, Kinky Boots), Kitchen (Cry it Out, Hand to God) and Cherry (George Kaplan, Snow Queen, Felt Sad, Posted a Frog) alike. And Sylvie Yntema (Cherry: The Snow Queen and Felt Sad, Posted a Frog; Civic Ensemble: Katrina Ten Years Later, On the Corner, After Orlando, and In the Parlour.)

Among the stellar design and production team for A Day is NYC set designer and Ithaca College Professor Daniel Zimmerman (Roundabout Theatre Company, Lincoln Center, Ars Nova, Second Stage); composer and sound designer Lesley Greene, veteran of dozens of shows at the Kitchen; and newcomer Noah Elman who will be developing the live video-mixing techniques he pioneered for the Cherry’s Felt Sad, Posted a Frog. The play is translated by Taylor Barrett Gaines; performances are directed by Wendy Dann (numerous credits at the Kitchen and Hangar theaters, as well as companies around the country), and video mise en scène is directed by Cherry Artistic Director Samuel Buggeln.

All performances are at 7:30PM.

v16i41