MARIA MELCHIORRE
Staff Writer
The Big Read, a program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, provides grants for unique community reading initiatives. This year, Fredonia was honored with a grant to be a Big Read community. Each community in the program has a single, classic novel that its programming is based around.
This year the local community is reading Zora Neale Hurston’s, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The James Prendergast Library in Jamestown hosted the kickoff of this year’s program with a poetry slam. Poets were asked to read or recite on the themes of Hurston’s novel, including women’s issues and the culture of 1930s.
The keynote speaker for the program is Dr. Jennifer Ryan-Bryant, an associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. She will be giving a talk tonight at 7 p.m. at The 1981 Fredonia Opera House.
“A Great Fishnet: Metaphor and Memory in Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’” will mediate upon the “Feminist and Womanist sensibilities in Zora Neale Hurston’s work,” said Ryan-Bryant.
“Womanism,” a term popularized by Alice Walker, roughly means a feminism that is deeply rooted in the compounded oppressions of race and gender experienced by black women. A term that intersectional feminism has nearly, but not quite, filled the boots of. Womanism has an anthropological weight to it as it is deeply rooted in black culture.
“I look specifically at Hurston’s inclusion of various episodes that critique contemporary patriarchal attitudes as well as her explorations of popular black oral traditions like signifying and playing the dozens,” said Ryan-Bryant. These traditions are games of exchanged insults historically common in black communities — essentially a game of “roasting” or “yo mama.”
Following the program’s keynote speech, an original stage adaptation of the novel, “Watching God,” will be presented on tomorrow in Reed Library. The performance is being staged by Venture Productions, a local stage and screen production company with offices at the Fredonia Incubator. Owned by Ted Sharon, head of performance with Fredonia’s Department of Theatre and Dance, Venture Productions partnered with the Fredonia Technology Incubator in 2014.
“Venture is the perfect vehicle for employing students in professional projects that benefit Chautauqua County,” said Sharon. “‘Watching God’ is one of many productions that has allowed students, interns, faculty and community to combine forces for good in our area.”
“Watching God” was adapted from the novel by Anna Chicco. Bree Covington and Nick Cahill, who play Phoebe and Narrator 3, respectively were both involved with a production of “The Great Gatsby” with Venture Productions and The Big Read last year.
“What Anna did was she adapted the novel into the vernacular in which the characters of the time spoke. It’s written very phonetically,” said Covington of the script.
“She did a great job of paring down a 200-something page book into a script which still has all of the same plot points and gets the story across quite effectively,” said Cahill.
“She stayed true to the major point of the story: feminism, for women of color,” said Casterline Villar, who plays Narrator 1, “her vernacular adaptation also makes it so much more powerful because it’s like you’re there, you’re living it. She made sure that it wasn’t just talked about, it was seen through the narrator’s, two of which are women.”
“Every performance is going to be unique,” said Villar of the alternative staging space in the Reed Library garden area. While there will be a stage assembled, there will still be elements of improv necessary for the actors who have not had access to the area.
“It really keeps you on your toes, both for the actors and the audience,” she continued, “and that really plays into the authenticity of the piece.”