Arts & Entertainment

Dead Men (and Women) Walking at Green-Wood Cemetery

The cemetery will host a production of "The Spoon River Anthology"

Illuminated by a full moon and blazing torches, the dead will be walking, talking and singing in the middle of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Wednesday night will mark the New York City premiere of writer and director Tom Andolora’s a theatrical adaptation of Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 collection of poems entitled, “The Spoon River Anthology.”

The show, produced by Q22 Entertainment and the Green-Wood Historic Fund, will have a short run ending on June 26. A trolley will shuttle the audience each night at 8 p.m. (on Saturday at 11 p.m. for a midnight show) from the cemetery’s gates on 25th Street and Fifth Avenue to the middle of the grounds for a night of eerie theatrics.

Eleven actors will play 47 different characters (all are dead residents of the fictional town of Spoon River), and will reflect on their past lives through timeless monologues about abortion, murder, suicide and revenge amongst the headstones.

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Halina Newberry Grant, a 38-year-old stand-up comic, writer and producer, plays five different characters on stage. Her favorite is the village milliner with questionable morals.

“I have had a lot of fun with Mrs. Williams. She has her way with many husbands,” said Grant, who lives around the corner from the 173-year-old cemetery and historic landmark. 

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Grant and the other actors will don garb of the early 1900’s while musicians stir the air with hymns from the same era amongst the 560,000 permanent residents that include the American politician Boss Tweed, Brooklyn Dodgers owner Charles Ebbets and the artist Jean- Michel Basquiat.

Tom Andolora, who before starting this project had a fear of cemeteries, toys with the idea of speaking with the deceased on and off the stage (or in this case the graveyard).

“[In “The Spoon River Project”], the dead come forward and share deep secrets of their lives,” said Andolora, who has been working on his adaptation for 10 years and teaches musical theatre at Brooklyn College. “If the dead can speak to us and we can listen to them, maybe we can learn a lesson—maybe we can learn how to release the festering and unnecessary things we carry.”

“Spoon River, like any work with longevity, has the universal and permanent themes of love, belief in a higher being and fear, which are all constants in humanity,” said Grant. “That’s what is important about this piece, it transcends time.”

The other importance of course is its choice setting.

“Hopefully, sitting in a dark cemetery,” said Andolora, “The audience will feel the bonechilling-ness and the little queasy feeling in the stomach.”

For more information about tickets and show times, call (718) 768-7300 or visit http://www.green-wood.com/2011/the-spoon-river-project/


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