Philly Weekly: "Celebrate SILVERHILL... A Great New Play"

Check out these excerpts from J. Cooper Robb’s review of SILVERHILL from this week's Philadelphia Weekly:

Great new plays are rare — all the more reason to celebrate Philadelphia playwright Thomas Gibbons’ new work Silverhill, which is making its world premiere in an effectively straightforward production by InterAct Theatre Company...

The ensuing conflict between Frank and Alden sets up a debate between diametrically opposed economic systems — but what ultimately leads to blows is a woman...

In [Christopher] Coucill’s portrayal, Alden isn’t a fiery, charismatic leader with soaring rhetoric. The other members are attracted by his conviction, and his unwavering certainty that God speaks directly to him. The quietly effective performance is appropriately sincere, and we can easily understand why the elder members of the group are unquestioning in their allegiance to him.

[Dan] Hodge’s Frank doesn’t have the same sense of spiritual conviction that Coucill brings to Alden, but he makes up for it with ambition and salesmanship. Frank takes three younger members of Silverhill in a game of shopping; it's the first time they've seen currency. Seductively, Hodge rubs a dollar bill between his fingers and proclaims, “It feels like America.”

In America, monogamy is regarded as the standard of success in marriage, and wealth as the standard of success in life. In Silverhill, Gibbons asks us to examine these beliefs... If you like a play that prompts questions rather than providing answers, Silverhill leaves you with plenty of food for thought.

Links to more information about SILVERHILL:

Purchase Tickets

Read J. Cooper Robb's Entire Philadelphia Weekly Review

Read Mark Cofta’s Philadelphia City Paper Review

Read John Dowlin’s Weekly Press Review in the Nov. 3 Issue

Read Ellen Wilson Dilks’ Stage Magazine Review

Read Toby Zinman's Inquirer Review

An Interview with Playwright Thomas Gibbons

An Interview with Director Seth Rozin

Watch the Video Trailer of SILVERHILL

InterAct Invites Academics to Respond to SILVERHILL

InterAct invited David Cregan, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova, and  Elliott Shore, Chief Information Officer, Director of Libraries, & Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College, to attend SILVERHILL and write down some of their thoughts on the play. Cregan's piece explores how SILVERHILL follows a long, theatrical tradition of using historical events to comment on current day issues, while Shore puts SILVERHILL into a historical context that shows how many utopian societies struggled to pass their founders' ideals on to subsequent generations...

David Cregan, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Villanova:

SILVERHILL is an intriguing play inspired by the nineteenth century Oneida Community in upstate New York. Its allure is partially based on the prospect that the audience will be privy to the secrets of a hidden and defensively private community. The allure of this play is further compounded by the potential romance of entering a simpler time and by the notion that we will get a glimpse of foundational Americana. What one discovers in this production, however, is the reality that the past is not that different from the present, and that there are fundamental similarities in the drives and the passions of people who make choices that seem far away from our own. SILVERHILL employs the historical in plot and design to awaken curiosity and to draw its audiences away from the chaos of contemporary multi-media distractions, but not in an attempt to pain an anthropological portrait of a community built on the rejection of more cosmopolitan virtues.

Theatre has long used the facts of the past as the inspiration for playwriting and production, but engages history in a markedly unique fashion: it brings traditional historical memory out of the past and into the present through the immediacy of live performance. This practice of the proximity of history through actor, set, design, and playwriting allows contemporary audiences to engage critical historic moments and make connections with modern political, cultural, social, and personal issues. In this sense the theatre decisively connects the past and the present in a fashion unachievable by textual academic discourse or static media such as photographs or film. The audience finds themselves between light down and lights up, living in another place and another time. Theatre that mediates the past creates shared experiences and moments of cultural continuity that permit insight into how we have become who we are.

The Israeli theatre scholar Freddie Rokem offers useful insight into the theatre’s general contribution to historical consciousness and its impact on contemporary thinking, at time revealing the root what has become accepted as conventional wisdom:

By performing history the theatre, at times even more forcefully than other discourses about the past like historiographic writing or novels about historical events, engages in such ideological debates, frequently intervening in them directly. What may be seen as specific to the theatre in dealing directly with the historical past is its ability to create an awareness of the complex interaction between the destructiveness and the failures of history, on the one hand, and the efforts to create a viable and meaningful work of art, trying to confront these painful failures on the other.

Rokem’s insight reveals how SILVERHILL engages in historical debate in its ideas while simultaneously illuminating how the play connects with InterAct’s artistic mission to educate and provoke audiences. This mission has the potential pitfall to become overtly obvious in its political agenda, thus draining the interpretive and aesthetic qualities necessary for good theatre. In other words, InterAct is faced with the challenge of being provocative politically or culturally without reducing the theatrical practice of its mission to mere propaganda. SILVERHILL successfully combines the allure of drama through its historically voyeuristic glimpse of this otherwise closed community, with the culture tension which dominates our modern experience: free market capitalism. Thus SILVERHILL functions as both history and art as it reveals aesthetic in design and cultural failure in plot and character. Its primitive story of an isolated and peaceful community is aesthetically appealing while the conflict of its plot reveals just how similar issues of great and money are then and now.

InterAct’s production of SILVERHILL provokes a connection with the past that goes beyond wanting to trace through history a clear pathway of events that have delivered us into the present reality in which we find ourselves. Instead of simply viewing archaic events of the past, we are presented with virtues and vices that are timeless and continue to shape cultural discourse. But what is history if not a series of events that have happened in the past?

The French philosopher Michele Foucault theorizes history in order to uncover how ideas or even ideology are past from one generation to another. Foucault’s accounts juxtapose ‘traditional history’ and, what he describes as ‘effective history’ in order to provide insight into the process of the formation of history itself, thus contributing greatly to an analysis of this dramatic historical engagement:

The former transposes the relationship ordinarily established between eruption of an event and necessary continuity. An entire historical tradition (theological or rationalistic) aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity – as a teleological movement or a natural process. “Effective” history, however, deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations. An event, consequently, is not a decision, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination which poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked “other.”

 The most unique characteristic that SILVERHILL manifests is the influence of money and material possessions in shaping peoples values and choices. The play offers a much more complex argument between good and bad, religious and secular, and thus focuses on the seductive power of the desire for possession. While many desire a return to the values of the past, this play stands as a recognition that the insatiability of human possessiveness continues to pull us apart, perhaps at the expense of our communities.

Ultimately theatre is grounded in a series of relationships between actor and script, performance and audience and society. It combines both the events of the past and the ideas that continue long after the actual moment has passed. SILVERHILL is not a glimpse at the past but, instead, a criticism of the present. The initial distance established between audience and play is bridged through ideas and their living impact of recognizing our world in the theatrical experience. This recognition, under the best of circumstances, allows us to glimpse in the mirror. Theatre and history together in practice dissolves difference into similarity, allowing politics and cultural criticism to emerge through theatrical artistry, this aspiration is the impulse that drives theatre to awaken that which is asleep and have an impact in the moment.

[1] Rokem, Freddie, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre.  Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000p.3.

[2] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow.  New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, p.88.

Elliott Shore, CIO, Director of Libraries, & Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College:

The urge to perfectionism is an old one in the history of Europeans on this continent -- it seems to be present from the start and it still inspires and haunts this country today. Want and the lack of opportunity induced desperate people to leave their homes and this flight was intertwined with successive outbreaks in Northern Europe and North America of messianic Christianity. Poverty and the promise of the holy land beckoned some to the place where, they thought, one could start from scratch. Religious revivals repeatedly fanned flames that burned bright with the desire to build the city on the hill, to create on earth that ideal world and bequeath it to future generations. Women and men were told or believed or were led to understand that the city was corrupt, that the virgin land, where no one had ever lived or farmed before, was the last best place to re-create the Biblical Eden from which humankind had been banished, where all could live together as one family. Keeping the garden safe often meant forbidding any and all of the corrupting influences of civilization.

All of the pieces of this narrative show up in the drama SILVERHILL, based on one of the most prominent of the utopian experiments of the 19th century. The play demonstrates the difficulties that all of these experiments had in passing on to the children the ideals of the generation which experienced the alienation that had led to the founding moment.

Those who had been shielded from living in the world, of course, did not have the fire of the parents' experience: the Puritans had trouble with their children and the Oneidans with theirs. This is all in SILVERHILL, with the added fillip that not all utopia experiments included: freedom of choice in sexual partners. But, in spite of excellent actresses and actors, a handsome set and fluent writing, the play doesn't take us far enough. The deeper issues are left on the table; one hopes that the author meant the audience to contemplate them afterward, but maybe it is the power of simple dualities and rigid solutions that are built into this way of looking at life that has so captured the American spirit that the author himself can only think within those inherited categories. Why do we all seem so stuck in the same flat view of the world, one where evil and good seem crystal clear, where solutions are absolute? Either withdraw from the world, or be engulfed by commercialism, either possess nothing--not even love for one's mate -- or wallow in the need to possess everything and everyone. The search for simple answers to simple questions -- witness the just completed national elections -- is reflected in mainstream American politics, its view of the world outside its own doors, and its religious fervor. This version of one utopian experiment is caught in the same reduction of the complexity of life into the shallow categories that it seems to condemn.

Links to more information about SILVERHILL:

Purchase Tickets

An Interview with Playwright Thomas Gibbons

An Interview with Director Seth Rozin

City Paper: SILVERHILL "Fascinates" & "Soars"

Check out these excerpts from Mark Cofta’s review of SILVERHILL from today's Philadelphia City Paper:

Philly playwright Thomas Gibbons' eighth premiére with InterAct Theatre Co. harks back to an obscure bit of American history in a drama that's surprisingly meaningful today… Nick Embree's handsome set features huge gates - do they lock out the corrupt outside, or imprison Silverhill's citizens? Christopher Coucill makes leader Alden a fiery prophet, tall and lean with an Old Testament white beard… In Alden's perfect community, rebellion is, conveniently, a sin… Soon, philosophies clash: communism vs. capitalism, monogamy vs. free love, dictatorship vs. democracy, with fascinating modern parallels. A great cast brings the debate to life in personal, intimate, often humorous performances… The lively debate about divinity and human perfection, and ideas about charismatic leaders and the inevitable lure of anything forbidden, resonate powerfully. SILVERHILL fascinates with its glimpse of pre-1960s American social experiments, but soars through its fresh exploration of eternal - and, thus, contemporary - issues.

Links to more information about SILVERHILL:

Purchase Tickets

Read Mark Cofta’s Entire Philadelphia City Paper Review

Read John Dowlin’s Weekly Press Review in the Nov. 3 Issue

Read Ellen Wilson Dilks’ Stage Magazine Review

Read Toby Zinman's Inquirer Review

An Interview with Playwright Thomas Gibbons

An Interview with Director Seth Rozin

Watch the Video Trailer of SILVERHILL

Weekly Press: SILVERHILL is "A Gem Of A Play... Fresh... Engaging... Smart"

Check out these excerpts from John Dowlin’s review of SILVERHILL from this week's issue of Weekly Press:

In 1848, John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida settlement in upstate New York... This was also the year Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto. Three years later, Herman Melville would publish Moby Dick, perhaps the epic poem of capitalism. Heady times. ... vividly portrayed in Thomas Gibbons' well-grafted new play, SILVERHILL, produced by InterAct... Director Seth Rozin has carefully coached seven talented, accomplished actors to present a fresh look at mid-19th century communal America. ... SILVERHILL is a gem of a play, engaging us in a political/Biblical debate while relieving with Shaker songs and incidental music. It's a smart course on how our troubled, often confused nation has grown and continues to grow. To borrow and extend a thought from William Penn... 'Let us now see what a little history can do.'

Links to more information about SILVERHILL:

Purchase Tickets

Read John Dowlin’s Entire Weekly Press Review in the Nov. 3 Issue

Read Ellen Wilson Dilks’ Stage Magazine Review

Read Toby Zinman's Inquirer Review

An Interview with Playwright Thomas Gibbons

An Interview with Director Seth Rozin

Watch the Video Trailer of SILVERHILL

Stage Magazine: SILVERHILL is a “Powerful Production...I was in Heaven for Two Hours”

Check out these excerpts from Ellen Wilson Dilks’ review of SILVERHILL on Stage Magazine’s website:

I count myself among those in the theatre community who feel theatre should provoke conversations about life and important issues, as well as entertain. Some of my favorite moments as an audience member have been when a production has forced me to question my views on something. When it reaches into my id... When I can’t stop talking about it and analyzing it on the way home. InterAct’s current production, SILVERHILL, onstage at the Adrienne’s main space, is such a play... SILVERHILL definitely has parallels to today’s world. It was the love of money and material things that created the current economic meltdown. We can hopefully fix our future by not forgetting our past.

Director Seth Rozin has hit every note of the script perfectly; my companion and I were totally drawn in to the world of SILVERHILL and its inhabitants. Rozin has balanced the comic moments of the script beautifully with the emotionally charged ones, getting wonderfully nuanced performances out of each member of this solid ensemble of actors. Nick Embree’s scenic design, which starts out showing us the gates to the commune, is deceptively simple and uses the small space of The Adrienne to full effect, moving the action smoothly along. The actors deftly shift the few furniture pieces as needed to create the various locales of the commune. Lightning designer Peter Whinnery and Sound Designer Kevin Francis bring just the right mix to the production, helping to put the viewer totally into the “spirit.” Obviously inspired by the Amish and the polygamy cults of Utah, Rosemarie McKelvey works her usual costume magic, ably assisted by the properties designers. Props to Avista Custom Theatrical Services.

I strongly urge everyone to see this powerful production - you will be talking about it for hours afterwards. Questions are still reeling around in my head…. Add to that the joy of seeing truly gifted actors bring a wonderful script to life under the guidance of an exceedingly talented director and I was in heaven for two hours and 10 minutes.

Links to more information about SILVERHILL:

Purchase Tickets

Read Ellen Wilson Dilks’ Entire Stage Magazine Review

Read Toby Zinman's Inquirer Review

An Interview with Playwright Thomas Gibbons

An Interview with Director Seth Rozin

Watch the Video Trailer of SILVERHILL

Video Trailer for SILVERHILL...

Watch the video trailer for InterAct's SILVERHILL...



Links to more information about SILVERHILL:

Purchase Tickets

Read Toby Zinman's Philadelphia Inquirer Review

An Interview with Playwright Thomas Gibbons

An Interview with Director Seth Rozin

Philadelphia Inquirer: SILVERHILL is an "Impassioned" "Fine New Play..."

Check out these excerpts from Toby Zinman's review of SILVERHILL in today's Inquirer:

A Utopia Beset by Lust and Conflict

By Toby Zinman
Friday, October 29, 2010

... Silverhill is the name of Thomas Gibbons' fine new play at InterAct Theatre Company and it's also the name of a 19th-century utopian religious community, based on the Oneida community in upstate New York. The very word utopia means "no place" - but that doesn't seem to stop anybody from hoping this time will be different.

Begin with the set... a huge metal gate, the name emblazoned across it. The question is, does the gate lock the world out or the community in?

... The pleasures of a good historical drama are many... their problems are our problems, and their solutions shed light on ours, since Gibbons gives each point of view an impassioned monologue.

... Strife, both economic and sexual, ensues, raising questions about human nature: Is love always possessive? Is male competition always sexual? Is innocence good or foolish? Is capitalism inevitably soul-destroying? Is private ownership a function of individuality? Does leadership always become tyranny? Do the young always rebel against the rules of their society? Good stuff to think about.

Seth Rozin directs the strong cast.

Links to more information about SILVERHILL:

Purchase Tickets

Read Toby Zinman's Entire Inquirer Review

An Interview with Playwright Thomas Gibbons

An Interview with Director Seth Rozin

Watch the Video Trailer of SILVERHILL

SILVERHILL On Rep Radio

Rep Radio's Kristen Scatton interviews playwright Thomas Gibbons, director Seth Rozin and actor Nancy Boykin on the inspiration behind SILVERHILL and what it takes to put a world premiere play on stage...

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SILVERHILL Featured at Examiner.com

InterAct's good friend Samantha Clarke, who was featured in the cast of last season's THE ELABORATE ENTRANCE OF CHAD DEITY, writes about the Philadelphia theatre scene at Examiner.com. Her latest column features several quotes from playwright Thomas Gibbons about his inspiration behind writing SILVERHILL.

Read Her Latest Column Here



SILVERHILL Director Interview with DCTheatreScene.com

In the second of a series of interviews with Philadelphia theatre directors, Joel Markowitz of DCTheatreScene.com interviewed Seth Rozin, director of InterAct's production of SILVERHILL, about the world premiere of the new play, his long-standing working relationship with playwright Thomas Gibbons, and what makes InterAct a unique theatre on the Philadelphia scene.

Before I plan a trip to Philadelphia, I always check to see if InterAct has a show running. This weekend, 6 members of The Ushers and Broadway Bound Meetup will be heading to Philly with me for a theatre-filled weekend. I can’t wait to introduce them to the brilliance of InterAct’s productions by attended their new production of Silverhill. I asked Director Seth Rozin to tell us about the production...

Read Joel Markowitz's Interview Here

InterAct Visits The Inspiration For Its Biggest Hit: PERMANENT COLLECTION

Thanks to a posting on Wendy Rosenfield's Drama Queen blog, we're pleased to learn that an article posted yesterday by The Chicago Tribune reports that back in 2005, President Barrack and First Lady Michelle Obama attended a performance of Northlight Theatre's production of PERMANENT COLLECTION, a drama that received it's World Premiere at InterAct in 2003.

For those who missed it, PERMANENT COLLECTION uses a fictionalized account of the story behind the Barnes Foundation to frame a compelling and thought-provoking examination of race relations in the United States. Written by InterAct's Resident Playwright, Thomas Gibbons, PERMANENT COLLECTION is, to date, the best-selling play in InterAct's history and has gone on to become one of our most subsequently produced premieres, with over two dozen national and international productions.

This all served to remind me that I had neglected to post a note about InterAct's recent visit to the Barnes Foundation:

During the recent run of THE RANT, InterAct Artistic Director Seth Rozin arranged for a field trip to the Barnes for the production's playwright, actors and InterAct's administrative staff. Having grown up in the neighborhood nearby, Seth thought it would be a fascinating point of local interest for Aldo Billingslea and Andrew Case, the production's out-of-town artists, as well as an important lesson in InterAct history for the show's artists, the staff and a few close friends of the company, since most of us had not visited the inspiration behind the company's biggest hit. He also thought it was important for us to go while the Barnes is still in its original home in Lower Merion, before it's relocation to the museum district in Center City, since changes to the permanent collection (hence the title) serves the most pivotal role in the plot of the script.

Left to Right: Seth Rozin, Julie Grega, Rebecca Wright, Jessica Hurley, Dwight Wilkins, Kimberly Fairbanks, David Golston, Aldo Billingslea, Elena Araoz and Daniel Sumile. Not pictured: Kathy Jaffari, Andrew Case, Kia Feindt, David Ingram, Joshua Lieberman and David & Ziva Brown

On a personal note, before moving to Philadelphia I had the privilege of working on a production of PERMANENT COLLECTION at Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City, MO. Prior to researching the play, I had no knowledge of the Barnes - I was soley drawn into the play's dramatic story and important message. Throughout the course of marketing the show I learned a lot about the Barnes and its unique creation and subsequent history, however, nothing prepared me for the jaw-dropping experience of seeing it in person. I was taken, as was most of the those in our group, by complete surprise at the astounding quality (and sheer volume) of a collection that was originally amassed as the whim of one man's passion. Everyone in our group left that day with a renewed appreciation for the power and beauty that amazing art brings to the world...

- David Golston, Director of Marketing & PR