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The maiden voyage of the Powerhouse Theater summer drama program in 1985 was a portentous one for its fledgling projects. The season highlight was "Savage in Limbo," a play by the aspiring writer John Patrck Shanley about lonely barflies in a Bronx tavern. Shanley has since snagged a Tony Award, a Pulitzer Prize and an Oscar to tuck under his belt, but his relationship with Powerhouse has far from waned. Six of his plays have premiered through the program, including the 2005 runaway hit “Doubt: A Parable.”
“It’s evolved to the point where it’s a different program,” said Powerhouse Theater Producing Director Ed Cheetham. “The fundamentals are the same, but it’s different in that it’s larger and has a greater professional network. Shanley has been a consistent presence, and that is the same with other actors, directors and writers who have been coming back here for years.” Relationships with theater moguls like Shanley, Frances McDormand, Tom Donaghy, David Straithairn and others have cemented the Powerhouse Theater’s status as a definitive summer experience for aspiring theater students.
Vassar College and The New York Stage and Film collaborate for the summer drama program, which trains young writers, actors and directors with an intense regimen to break them into the world of professional theater. The program is for established artists as well, providing them with the opportunity to mold new projects or premier a new play or musical.
The program’s 25th anniversary season will run from June 26 to Aug. 2 on the Vassar Campus and will feature a gala concert celebrating the quarter-century mark on Saturday, June 27.
“The Powerhouse season is a huge complement to Vassar’s Drama Department,” said Jeye Moliere ’12, an acting apprentice with the 2007 Powerhouse program. “It’s just fantastic that we have professionals working here every summer on completely new works.”
The season features everything from experimental theater to Shakespeare, but the most prominent of the lineup is the Broadway musical “The Burnt Part Boys,” set to be performed from July 17 to 26. The play is slated to make its New York City premiere in 2010, making the Powerhouse premiere a year in advance. The highly-anticipated play by Mariana Elder tells the story of Virginian teenagers who try to prevent the reopening of a coal mine where their fathers died ten years before. It will feature the award-winning music-and-lyrics team of Chris Miller and Nathan Tyson, whose previous works include the musical “Fugitive Songs.”
“Producing a fully-staged musical doesn’t happen very often,” said Cheetham. “We worked ‘Romantic Poetry’ last year, John Patrick Shanley’s foray into musical theater, making this our second musical.”
The season will also feature the newest project of composer Duncan Sheik, a musical called “Whisper House” to be performed from July 10 to 11. Sheik was responsible for the 2006 Tony Award- and Grammy Award-winning hit “Spring Awakening,” which featured Vassar’s own Lillian Cooper ’12. His new project is a collaboration with the Kyle Jarrow, the lauded Off-Broadway playwright and lyricist. “Whisper House” is a ghost story involving a boy living in a haunted lighthouse with an eccentric aunt. The play will be directed by Keith Powell. Powell is best known as the self-aggrandizing Twofer on the popular Emmy Award-winning television show 30 Rock.
A variety of other events add color to the hefty season. Shanley maintains his storied presence with Powerhouse with a reading of his play “Pirate” as part of the program’s two reading festivals. Other Powerhouse attractions include “The Inside Look” series, which workshops plays with “partial production value”—plays that are somewhere in between a reading and a full-fledged production—as well as the Powerhouse Apprentice Company’s outdoor productions of Shakespeare and Euripides and two visual art productions with the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. The staging of “Vera Laughed” should prove to be a local highlight, as it was written by Poughkeepsie native and local celebrity Keith Bunin.
“Summer Under the Stars: A Silver Anniversary Celebration,” is an outdoor June 27 gala that will commemorate a quarter-century of Powerhouse Theater. The event is still in its planning stages, but it will likely feature selections from popular plays of Powerhouse veterans such as Shanley, Theresa Rebeck and Richard Greenberg. Songs from the musicals Powerhouse has staged over the years will also be performed. Dinner and drinks will be served afterwards as actors and directors mingle with patrons.
For all of the celebrity and high-end production that is associated with Powerhouse theater, it is easy to forget about the educative element of the program. “It’s a good way for Vassar students to stick around during the summer and get an idea of what theater looks like as a career,” said Cheetham. “You can see with your own eyes how it all works.”
“All in all, I had 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. days, filled with theater,” said Moliere about her experience last summer, “and I haven’t regretted it once. Everything I learned has been truly invaluable. And, come on, who wouldn’t want to be in the same three mile radius as John Patrick Shanley for eight weeks?”
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