7 minute read
Sea life provides endless inspiration for this Wickford artist
Flexing Her Mussels
Wickford artist Alexandra Jedrey’s shell-inspired oil paintings head to arts fests across the state
By Karen Greco
Beauty grows out of adversity, and that’s exactly what happened with Wickford-based oil painter Alexandra Jedrey. The pandemic proved a turning point for her art career. Faced with time to fill because of the shutdowns, she decided to stir up some proverbial lemonade and offer her paintings for sale for the first time. “It came from a completely horrible time, but something really great grew from it,” says Jedrey. The first year, she launched her website and focused on online sales. For her second, she applied to be part of the Wickford Art Festival. When they accepted her, it was the realization of a childhood dream. “I grew up in the area. I’ve been going every year since I was little and it was always this far-fetched, glamorous thing. It’s kind of surreal to be participating in it now.”
Jedrey arrived at the University of New Hampshire an undeclared major, but when she took her first art class there, “I thought, yup, this is where I’m supposed to be.” She went on to get her master’s in education, becoming an art teacher when she returned to Rhode Island, but left her teaching career in 2021 to focus on her art full time.
Jedrey’s beautiful oil paintings of shells local to the shores of Rhode Island – filled with an ocean of seaworthy colors and textures, since her tool of choice is a pallet knife – dazzled art buyers at last year’s Wickford Art Festival. “I didn’t quite realize how high stakes it was,” she says of the festival’s impact on her art career. Her appearance led to booking more summer art festivals, as well as ongoing sales and direct commissions for long after, enough that she was able to quit her day job.
Shells are a recent focus for Jedrey. At first, her work hewed more traditional, doing portraits and then landscapes inspired by her extensive travels. But when she returned to Rhode Island and had to fill a wall above her bed, she decided to do it with a triptych of mussels. “I love the versatility and the colors,” she explains. Her mom loved it, too, and requested a painting, which led to friends, then friends of friends, asking for their own shell-inspired works.
The shells also are a boon on the festival circuit. “I personally love painting them,” she says, but notes that the smaller size of her canvases gives the art a more accessible price
Showstopper
Artistic director Tony Estrella on The Gamm’s provocative new season
By Karen Greco
Artistic director Tony Estrella in The Gamm’s 2021 production of It’s A Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play, which returns for the holidays for their 2022/23 season
There’s an alchemy to putting together a theater season and Tony Estrella, artistic director of The Gamm Theatre, is well attuned to that magic. “I think of seasons like a record album, where the songs are sequenced for a reason,” he says. “I want that same connection for the season, where the plays speak to each other. I want resonance for the subscriber, for us all to be in this collective headspace.”
In the spacious Gamm lobby, it’s incredible to think that this established and thriving Warwick theater has its roots on the fringe. A group of artists who grew out of Trinity Rep founded Alias Stage, the precursor to The Gamm, which was structured as an intense artist collective. Bold and adventurous, they leaned into the intimacy between actor and audience. It was a production of Antony and Cleopatra in a garage on Elbow Street that put the fledgling company on the map.
Fittingly, their season opener, Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night – which bundles 90 years of Russian history in one play – feels as audacious as doing Shakespeare in a car port. Estrella explains that the play was a last-minute addition to the season, one he didn’t think about until Russia invaded Ukraine.
“It rang a bell in my head about this great play.” Estrella leans forward, his whole body kinetic as he describes the play. “It’s dealing with these characters like [Isaac] Babel and Putin, but what it’s really about is how we manufacture truth, politically, and the play posits a kind of conspiracy theory that is very attractive, but factually, as far as we know, untrue. So how do we draw the line between fiction and reality? It’s increasingly hard, right? What theater can do, what art can do, is help contextualize this.”
The second play in their season, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, was the prepandemic play-that-got-away. A topical look at America’s economic decline through the lens of a community of blue-collar factory workers whose lives are ripped apart by layoffs, it felt apropos for the birthplace of the industrial revolution. But
The Gamm’s original request was declined, with the rights going to Trinity Rep. However, that production was curtailed by the pandemic.
When it came time for The Gamm to plot out this year’s season, Estrella saw the rights to the play were back on the table, so he folded it into the season. “[Trinity Rep] has precedent, as they should; the playwright needs to get the biggest audience possible,” says Estrella. “But we’re fighting from this smaller theater perspective.” This means Estrella keeps his eye on original work from more far-flung locales, particularly Great Britain. “Every morning, the first thing I do is read The Guardian theater section,” he says with a laugh.
The second half of the season has that anglophile bent. Estrella considers The Faith Healer, by the Northern Irish dramatist Brian Friel, a sort of seasonal shift, moving from the topicality of Russia and fading factory towns to a play that weaves a more pensive, but no less spellbinding, story. In interlocking monologues, a traveling healer and his companions recount a tragic night. “It’s like a four-part symphony,” says Estrella, who considers it a ghost story, one that commands the audience to sit back and listen. “I think it gets to the mythic roots of storytelling, and why we need live theater,” he says. “There’s a fundamental thing in us that needs to try to understand [life’s] complexities on a deeper level.”
The penultimate play in the season, Let the Right One In, is an adaptation of the horror novel-turned-cult-classic independent movie that premiered off-West End in London before transferring to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, where it created a mini-sensation, not the least of which was because of the amount of blood spilled on stage. (It is a vampire tale, after all.) Jack Thorne, who went on to pen Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway as well as His Dark Materials for Netflix, adapted it.
“I’m not the biggest horror movie fan in the world, but there’s something about that play that gets underneath your skin and moves you to your core in kind of an eternal way,” says Estrella. It’s also a complicated bit of stagecraft, that calls not only for copious amounts of blood but a heart-pounding scene that involves plenty of water. “We’re coming up with an exciting way to do it that hopefully will surprise people.”
Playwright Thorne’s Harry Potter faced off with Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, which wraps up The Gamm’s season, for the Tony Award for Best Play back in 2018. (For the record, “the boy who lived” won.) Set at the end of a nuclear disaster, the play is a three-hander whose small cast belies its oversized impact.
That could serve as a metaphor for The Gamm. “I think that’s part of our identity as a theater,” Estrella says. “One does that kind of work – meaning bold, certainly provocative – with all the complexity intact and a nice variety of plays that are surprising.” GammTheatre.org
TONY ESTRELLA, Artistic Director, The Gamm Theatre
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