Mad Horse Theatre to Present BY LOCAL, 6/5-8

Mad Horse Theatre will present the sixth installment of its successful BY LOCAL new play series. The series has established itself as a standard for bringing exciting, original scripts by Maine writers to theater audiences in the Greater Portland area.

Mad Horse's June BY LOCAL series will take place between June 4th and June 8th. THE SCARLET LETTER, a musical, will appear Thursday June 4th and Saturday June 6th. VISION will be shown Friday June 5th and Monday June 8th. There will be no BY LOCAL show on Sunday, June 7th. All performances will be at 7:30 at the Mad Horse Theater, 24 Mosher St. in South Portland. Admission is pay what you can, with a suggested donation of $10. Tickets are available at the door, cash or check only. For more information, visit www.madhorse.com, check out our Facebook page, or call 747-4148.

Adapted from Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale of the same name, THE SCARLET LETTER (the musical) reverently tells the story of Hester Prynne, a seamstress condemned for adultery in early New England, and the plot of her mysterious husband to root out and torture her lover. Played out against the backdrop of the birth of a nation, this passionate personal drama exposes the dangerous self-inflicted psychological trauma that can come from living by the idealistic expectations of others, rather than remaining true to one's self.

THE SCARLET LETTER is a collaborative work of five co-authors working transatlantically between two U.S. states and London's West End: Stacey Mancine (lyrics, original melodies) and Dan Koloski (compositions) drafted the original work in Washington, D.C., between 1996-2000; Simon Gray (orchestrations, and additional compositions), Michael Bahar (dramaturg, book), and Eric Braverman (book), joined the writing team in 2001 on the occasion of THE SCARLET LETTER's first production in Edinburgh.

VISION, by Keith Powell Beyland, is a play that unfolds in reverse. The start of each scene travels backward in time - sometimes a few minutes, sometimes decades. It chronicles the rise and fall of a wunderkind minority painter named Joey - who also happened to be blind. Told through the eyes of those who surrounded him, and featuring the music of the singer who most inspired him, the play examines what we see...and what we do not.

Keith Powell Beyland's full-length plays include Vision, The Waiting Room and Insomniac. Keith wrote the Libretto for two ballets for children - Around the World with Flat Stanley: The Case of the Red Shoes and Red Riding Hood and the Big "Bad" Wolf, which are currently in repertory with the Portland School of Ballet. He serves as the Artistic Director of Portland's Dramatic Repertory Company, where he has directed many shows, including The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence and last year's Equivocation (co-director). He holds a degree with Honors from the Dramatic Writing Program at New York University.

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