ALABAMA STORY Receives East Coast Premiere at WHAT

Alabama Story by Kenneth Jones receives its East Coast premiere at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, opening August 25 and running through September 25.

A gentle children's book with an apparent hidden message stirs the passions of a segregationist senator and a no-nonsense state librarian in 1959 Montgomery, just as the civil rights movement is flowering. Based on the conflict reported world-wide between Alabama State Librarian Emily Wheelock Reed and Senator E.O. Eddins over Garth Williams' children's book "The Rabbit's Wedding," Alabama Story puts political foes, star-crossed childhood friends, and one feisty author on the same page to conjure a Deep South of the imagination.

Kenneth Jones is a playwright, librettist and lyricist. Alabama Story was a 2014 Finalist in the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference and a 2016 nominee for the Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. It had its world premiere by Pioneer Theatre Company in 2015 and this year will have productions in Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. His play Two Henrys, a Semi-Finalist in the 2015 and 2016 O'Neill Playwrights Conferences, was seen in Pioneer's 2016 Play-By-Play series and had private table readings by Florida Studio Theatre and Off-Broadways's TACT/The Actors Company Theatre. His new serious comedy Hollywood, Nebraska was seen in TACT's 2016 NewTACTics New Play Festival. With Karen Azenberg, he co-conceived Pioneer's 2015 holiday musical It Happened One Christmas. His darkly comic Christmas revue Naughty/Nice (with composer Gerald Stockstill) is published by stagerights.com. His musical Voice of the City (with composer Elaine Chelton) was developed by York Theatre Company and Human Race Theatre Company. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, BMI and The 72nd Street Gang Playwrights Collective.

Alabama Story
by Kenneth Jones
August 25 - September 25, 2016
Thursday-Monday at 8:00PM
Tickets start at $20
Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater
2357 Route 6, Wellfleet
508-349-9428
www.what.org

Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater is the award-winning theater company that inspired "a new vigor for theater on the Cape" (New York Times). In honor of the theater's namesake, Julie Harris, WHAT continues to be a sounding board for new and bold ideas, presenting "continually adventurous theater" (Boston Globe), and year-round programming.