Ancram Center's Summer Play Lab Series Continues Next Month With CENTURIES

Summer Play Lab, now in its fifth season at Ancram Center for the Arts, offers theater artists space, production support, and a budget to develop and present new works. This year's second Summer Play Lab showing will be a first-look production on July 7 at 4pm of Centuries, an immersive concert collaboration from Matthew Dean Marsh (You Don't Know the Lonely One), Kate Douglas (The Lucky Few), and singer-composer Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez.  

Centuries follows a Midwest family through two generations and examines how landscapes and people change over time. At this production, the creators will talk through the libretto and perform many of the score's songs, which are infused with folk, chamber and soul music. Tickets may be purchased online at ancramcenter.org. General Admission: $20; student tickets $15 with ID. The complete production of Centuries will return to Ancram Center in October for its world premiere.

The final 2024 Summer Play Lab showing will be Conversations on August 4 at 4pm. Created and performed by Martha Redbone and Aaron Whitby, in collaboration with The Civilians, NYC, this music-theater piece features songs drawn from Redbone's conversations with tribal elders, family members and advisors who have been in her life for decades. Redbone is celebrated for her tasty gumbo of roots music that combines the folk and mountain blues sounds of her Appalachian childhood and the electric grit of her teenage years in pre-gentrified Brooklyn. She inherited her powerful gospel-singing father's voice and the resilient spirit of her mother's Southwestern heritage. The New Yorker calls her music "a brilliant collision of cultures." 

Ancram Center for the Arts is an award-winning theater located in New York's Hudson Valley. Housed in an historic Grange Hall, Ancram Center has since 2016 presented groundbreaking theater and musical performances by nationally recognized theater artists. Ancram Center for the Arts receives significant annual support from the New York State Council on the Arts and in 2023 was awarded a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. For tickets and information visit www.ancramcenter.org.

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