Dear Friends of Hartford Stage,

"One of the functions of art,” the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin observed when contemplating the power of language, “is to give people the words to know their own experience…Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”

We are storytellers at Hartford Stage, and have been wrestling this past year, bereft of our live performances, on how to share stories, and which stories to tell. As I write to you, I think about how much darkness and light we are experiencing in our community. The light of vaccinations and returning to in person gatherings ahead, and then the darkness of the continuing plague of racial and social injustices that surrounds us. What stories can help us heal, and how to share them? What stories can be helpful tools for knowing who we are?

In partnership with two extraordinary organizations, EPOCH (Engaged, Public, Oral and Community Histories) at UCONN and Connecticut Public Broadcasting, Hartford Stage is returning to an older art form, the radio play. Together we are creating short plays written by a diversity of writers, to be shared intergenerationally, and which will capture the variety of histories that have brought us together in this city.

If you are at all like me, you too love being told a good story, and allowing your imagination to fill in the visuals: seeing in your mind’s eye the dimensions only hinted at by the voices. And we all know, as Le Guin tells us, that we need stories to make sense of ourselves.

Join me for Scene and Heard: LIVE! on Wednesday, April 21 at 5 pm, as we welcome our partners—Dr. Fiona Vernal from the University of Connecticut and Tim Rasmussen from Connecticut Public Broadcasting—as well as Michael Bobbitt, our first commissioned playwright, to learn more about this new initiative.

I hope to see you next Wednesday,

Warmly, and gratefully,

–Melia