Weekend To-Do: Arkansas New Play Festival
A Disfarmer photo.
ARKANSAS NEW PLAY FESTIVAL
6 p.m., Nadine Baum Studios, Walton Arts Center, Fayetteville. $5 per play.
Thanks to a $25,000 grant from the Department of Arkansas Heritage, nine new plays by Arkansas playwrights debut in Fayetteville this weekend. All focus on some element of Arkansas. Four come from high school students and the other five from established playwrights. Actors will tackle each play with script in hand and without props or sets. Perhaps most anticipated is Werner Trieschmann's “Disfarmer” (7 p.m., Fri.), about the strange, posthumously acclaimed Heber Springs photographer. Other featured plays include “Look Away” (8:30 p.m., Fri.), by organizer Robert Ford. Based on a true story, it follows two black men escaping a lynch mob in Mississippi County. “Vinegar Pie and Chicken Bread” (12 p.m., Sat.), by A.E. Edwards, is an adaptation of Margaret Bolsterli's book of the same name about the frontier diaries of Nannie Stillwell Jackson. “Ivanhoe, Arkansas” (3:30 p.m., Sat.), by Sherry Kramer, weaves a tale of a “Passion Play” rehearsal with the construction of a NASCAR track and the emergence of a pack of white supremacists. Finally, Kevin Cohea's “Sundown Town” (8 p.m., Sat.) tells the tale of Healing Springs, Arkansas, which is changed in 1918 when a black drifter arrives.
