Don't Miss "My Dear Boy" at the Fletcher Wed. Oct. 22, 6pm

RU12 Community Center proudly presents "My Dear Boy" a production of WordStage Vermont in conjunction with the month long celebration of LGBTQ History Month at the Fletcher Library in Burlington.

WORDSTAGE VERMONT is a Chamber Music Readers Theater dedicated to the presentation of works with special literary, historical and musical merit. Our aim is to employ professional Vermont - based artists whose talents will illuminate the texts and music of some of the most fascinating and remarkable figures in the realms of history and the performing arts. Using letters, diaries, recorded conversations and contemporary chronicles underscored with musical compositions of the era, a WordStage Vermont performance will entertain, inform and educate audiences who have a love of literature, the humanities and the performing arts in their purest form. For information on our 2008-09 performances, please visit our web site at www.wordstagevt.com.

“My Dear Boy” is a program culled from the letters collected, edited and annotated by Rictor Norton and published under the same title in 1998 by Leyland Publications in San Francisco. The anthology is a collection of gay love letters documenting the heartbreak and joy of love between men for almost two thousand years.

The compilation offers a tremendous amount of riches from such diverse epistolarians as the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the 8^th Century Chinese Poet Bo Juyi, Italian Painter/Sculptor Michelangelo, Poets and Writers Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Jean Cocteau, W. H. Auden, and Allen Ginsberg and many more.

WordStage Vermont has chosen a dozen of these letters to present on this program as a prelude to the construction of an entire evening for our 2009-10 Season. The narrative and reading of the letters will be performed by G. Richard Ames, William Pelton and Tim Tavcar and will be underscored by the sensuous solo viola of Raymond Malone who will perform a series of romantic Italian Love Songs from the 17^th and 18^th centuries. 

A discussion of the performance will follow immediately afterward.