2024-25 Season
The Moors
By Jen Silverman
Blank Performing Arts Center
Barnum Studio Theatre
October 10-12, 2024
Director
Jennifer Ross Nostrala
Set and Props Designer
Natalie Hining
Costume, Hair & Makeup Designer
Caroline Frias
Stage Manager
Hannah Larsen
Sound Designer
Rick Goetz
Lighting Designer
Kenneth Norris
Fight & Intimacy Director
Jenn Allton
Music Director
Anna Lackaff
Huldey’s Ballad “and “Emilie’s Song” composed and arranged by Daniel Kluger
Original transitional music composed and arranged by Juan Rodriquez
The Moors is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Samuel French Inc. www.concordtheatricals.com
Off-Broadway premiere produced by The Playwrights Realm (Katherine Kovner, Artistic Director; Roberta Pereira, Producing Director) January, 2017 World Premiere produced by Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT James Bundy, Artistic Director; Victoria Nolan, Managing Director
Agatha…………………………………………………….………………..…...Amanda Orozco
Huldey………………………………………………………………………….Haley Brummett
Emilie……………………………………………………………………………..Cadence Clark
Marjory………………………………………………………………….....Maddy Gunzenhauser
The Mastiff………………………………………………………………...…....…..Robyn Aguilar
A Moor-Hen……………………………………………………………………..Paisha Goodrich
Setting
The bleak moors..1840s… ish
There will be no intermission.
Warning: There is simulated fog
Please make sure cell phones and alarms are turned off. Please no text messaging during the performance. Restrooms are located on the main and upper lobby levels
The videotaping or making of electronic or other audio and/or visual recordings of this production and distributing recordings or stream in any medium, including the internet, is strictly prohibited, a violation of the author’s rights and actionable under United Staes copyright law. For more information, please visit https://concordtheatricals.com/resources/protecting-artists .
The Guest Artists Program is a key component to the success of Simpson Productions. Guest artists help bring a new perspective to the work. The Moors has provided us the opportunity to bring guest intimacy and fight director, Jenn Allton and Music Director, Anna Lackaff, to Simpson.
Jenn Allton, Intimacy & Fight Director Jenn Allton is a member of the Society of American Fight Directors, holds Actor Combatant Proficiency in Rapier & Dagger, Quarter Staff and Hand-to-Hand, and continues to study additional weapons. In the Twin Cities she has taught and choreographed stage combat for the College of St. Catherine and St. Thomas University, Concordia College, White Elephant Theater Co., and 15 Head Theater Company. Jennifer has choreographed the fight scenes for several previous Simpson Productions shows. This year, in addition to choreographing the fights in The Moors, she also conducted a student workshop in single blade combat.
Anna Lackaff, Music Director Anna Lackaff tours nationwide as the keyboardist and harpsichordist for Mannheim Steamroller. She has been conductor/music director/pianist at San Jose Repertory Theatre, CA; New Repertory Theatre, Boston; Encore Musical Theatre, MI; Boston Center for the Arts; Off-Broadway; Performance Network, MI; Des Moines Playhouse; Noce; and many others. As a composer and arranger, her works include the score for A Christmas Carol, which has been performed annually over 500 times nationwide since 2005. She has also composed pop songs and instrumental and choral music, including her Ave Maria performed by The Western Wind. As a visual artist, Ms. Lackaff illustrated Virginia Tufte's memoir, Pieces, and her work has been cover art for the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association. Ms. Lackaff lives in Iowa with husband Dr. Aaron Santos, and she's delighted to be a guest artist at Simpson College once again. AnnaLackaff.com
The Moors was written by Jen Silverman and published in 2017. It is a dark comedy about love, desperation, and visibility. Silverman was inspired by the Brontë Letters as they wrote the play. “I’d spent months reading all these letters from Charlotte Brontë, so in a way that was just the theatrical language I was steeped in,” Silverman was also going through a hard time in their life when they first started writing the play during the FreeWrite residency at Williamstown.
The Brontës were a nineteenth-century literary family born in England. Charlotte (1816-1855), Emily (1818-1848) and Anne (1820-1849) are well-known poets and novelists. When publishing, they used male names: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The Brontës lived complex lives, and Charlotte wrote about it in letters mainly to Ellen Nussey, who Charlotte befriended when she was fourteen years old and was enrolled at the school of Miss Wooler in Roe Head, Mirfield. Nussey and Charlotte were lifelong friends, correspondents and thought to be potential lovers. There are over 500 letters written by Charlotte to Nussey. The letters showed her talent with a pen and paper.
As you're watching the play take into consideration the ways in which the story connects to today and how one might relate to the characters. The characters go through so many emotions in a course of four days, including loneliness, desperation, the need for attention and longing. While their actions to these feelings are extreme, take a moment and reflect after the play on the ways that it connects to social media, relationships and communication today.
Abby Hintz, dramaturg
The Letters of Charlotte Brontë
On her brother, Branwell Brontë
Silverman was not writing a play about the Brontë sisters, but she did keep the name of their brother Branwell as the brother to Agatha and Huldey. In her letters, Charlotte often described Branwell and his “illness” (alcohol and opiates) and the challenges that he brought upon the family. Her description of his death reveals how much pain he caused his family.
To W.S. Williams, 2 October 1848
“‘We have buried our dead out of our sight.’ A lull begins to succeed the gloomy tumult of last week. It is not permitted us to grieve for him who is gone as others grieve for those they lose; the removal of our only brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather in the light of a mercy than a chastisement. Branwell was his Father’s and his sisters’ pride and hope in boyhood, but since Manhood, the case has been otherwise. It has been our lot to see him take a wrong bent; to hope, expect, wait his return to the right path; to know the sickness of hope deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled, to experience despair at last; and now to behold the sudden early obscure close of what might have been a noble career.
I do not weep from a sense of bereavement—there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost—but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior; I had aspirations and ambitions for him once—long ago—they have perished mournfully—nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings—There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death—such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existences as I cannot describe I trust time will allay these feelings.
My poor Father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters, and much and long as he had suffered on his account—he cried out for his loss like David for that of Absalom—My Son! My Son! And refused at first to be comforted—and then—when I ought to have been able to collect my strength, and be at hand to support him—I fell ill with an illness whose approaches I had felt for some time previously—and of which the crisis was hastened by the awe and trouble of the death-scene the first I had ever witnessed. The past has seemed to me a strange week Thank Go—for my Father’s sake I am better now—though still feeble—I wish indeed I had more general physical strength—the want of it is sadly in my way. I cannot do what I would do, for want of sustained animal spirits—and efficient bodily vigour.
My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters had done in literature—he was not aware that they had ever published a line; we could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time misspent, and talents misapplied—Now he will never know. I cannot dwell longer on the subject at present; it is too painful.” (120-121)
On being a governess
The following excerpt is from a letter that Charlotte wrote to Emily Brontë, 8 June 1839. It highlights the challenges she experienced as a governess and a sense of being unseen by her employers.
“I have striven hard to be pleased with my new situation. The country, the house, and the grounds are, as I have said, divine. But, alack-a-day! There is such a thing as seeing all beautiful around you pleasant woods, winding white paths, green lawns, and blue sunshiny sky and not having a free moment or a free thought left to enjoy them in. The children are constantly with me, and more riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs never grew. As for correcting them, I soon quickly found that was entirely out of the question: they are to do as they like. A complaint to Mrs. Sidgwich brings only black looks upon oneself, and unjust, partial excuses to screen the children. I said in my last letter that Mrs. Sidgwich did not know me. I now being to find that she does not intend to know me, that she cares nothing in the world about me except to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end she overwhelms me with oceans of needle work, yards of cambric to hem, muslin nightcaps to make, and above all things, dolls to dress. I do not think she likes me at all I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil.” (12-13)
On the moors
The moors are as much a character in the play as the people and animals that inhabit them. In a letter to publisher W.S. Williams in 1850, Charlotte writes of her grief from losing her sisters and her experience with the moors.
For my part I am free to walk on the moors but when I go out there alone everything reminds me of the times when others were with me and then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll or heather, nor a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight, and when I look round, she is in the blue tins, the pales mists, the wave and shadows of the horizon. In the hill-country silence their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it now I dare not read it and am driven often to wish I could taste on draught of oblivion and forget much that, while mind remains, I never shall forget. (163).
Excerpts take from Charlotte Brontë: Selected Letters, Ed. Margaret Smith, Janet Gezari Oxford, UK 2010
Production Staff
Technical Director……………………………………………….…………….….Natalie Hining
Asst. Stage Manager.…………………………………………………………...Rebekah Geerdes
Asst. Costume Designer…………………………………………...…………….…Piper Jackman
Asst. Sound Designer………………………………………………………………...Milo Hamlin
Dramaturgy……………………………………………………………………………Abby Hintz
Deck/Prop Crew Head…………………………………………………….……Rebekah Geerdes
Deck/Prop Crew………………………………………………….Harley Eckert, Larry Schippers
Wardrobe Crew Head .............................................................................. …………..Leah Wilson
Wardrobe Crew…………………………………..Hannah Brewer, Keira McLain, Kylie Ozbun, Arseydia Rodriguez, Ian Wilde
Lighting and Sound Supervisor………………………………………………………Rick Goetz
Lightboard Operator…………………………………………………………………..McFarland
Sound Board Operator ….Milo Hamlin
Box Office Manager Michelle Rundquist
House Manager …..Lyza Cue
Front of House………………………………………………...……………………Vanna Freese
Poster Design………………………………………………….…………………….Nayeli Mejia
Production Crew
Scene Shop Supervisor: Natalie Hining
Costume Shop Supervisor: Caroline Frias
Costume Construction Crew: Robyn Aguilar, Lydia Dobson, Paisha Goodrich, Piper Jackman, Kylie Ozbun
Set Construction Crew: Maddy Gunzenhauser UGA Charli Burton, Vanna Freese, Serymar
Matias, Klay McCombs, Aaron Scholes
Lighting Crew: Kenneth Norris UGA Rebekah Geerdes, Milo Hamlin, McFarland, Max Monroe, Amanda Orozco
Sound : Lupe Contreras UGA
Simpson Productions :
Marketing: Abby Hintz UGA
Production Assistant: Hannah Larsen UGA
Faculty Supervisor of Marketing and Production Assistant: Jennifer Nostrala
Educational Outreach : Jeri Eisbrenner UGA
Educational Outreach Coordinator: Ann Woldt
Faculty Supervisor of Audience Services: Kara Raphaeli
UGA-Undergraduate Assistant
Undergraduate Assistants are positions across campus that are designed to offer students the opportunity to gain practical, in-depth experience complementing their formal education.
Simpson Productions Student Leadership
Theatre Department and Simpson Productions Scholarship Students
Scholarship recipients hold theatre as an essential part of their lives and are an integral part of the Simpson Productions company.
Cadence Clark Lyza Cue
Harley Eckert
Jeri Eisbrenner
Vanna Freese
Rebekah Geerdes
Maddy Gunzenhauser Abby Hintz
Piper Jackman
Hannah Larsen
Keira McLain
Kenneth Norris
Alpha Psi Omega, Theatre Honor Society
Kylie Ozbun
Arseydia Rodriguez
Larry Schippers
Ian Wilde
Students earn membership in Alpha Psi Omega through participation in Simpson Productions. The students strive to become theatre artists who serve the department and the community through creative expression and artistic excellence.
President Jeri Eisbrenner
Vice-President Kenneth Norris
Treasurer Aaron Scholes
Secretary Hannah Larsen
Historian Piper Jackman
Publicist Abby Hintz
Haley Brummett, Cadence Clark, Lyza Cue, Maddy Gunzenhauser, Taylor Kouski
Performing Arts Theme House
The Performing Arts Theme House focuses on supporting the performing arts on campus by sponsoring workshops and hosting a monthly cabaret style show, The Underground. This is the twenty-sixth consecutive year for the PA House.
Piper Jackman (house manager), Maxwell Wearmouth-Gweah, Jasper McGrath
Upcoming Shows:
Speed Dating Tonight!
Music and Lyrics by Michael Ching
Pote Theatre November 15-18, 2024
This one-act comic opera explores the human desire for connection. We will meet many different characters, some bold, some shy, some ready to start a relationship, and some just recovering.
Working: A Musical
From the book by Studs Terkel
Adapted by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso
Localized format conceived by Daniel C. Levine for ACT of CT*
Barnum Studio Theatre February 14-16, 2025
Based on Studs Terkel's best-selling book of interviews with American workers, Working paints a vivid portrait of the workers that the world so often takes for granted: the teacher, the waitress, the millworker, the mason, and the housewife, just to name a few. Nominated for six Tony Awards, this classic has been updated for a modern age, featuring songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Stephen Schwartz, Craig Carnelia, James Taylor, Micki Grant, and more.
Behind every job, there is a person with a story to tell
Medea
By Euripides
Pote Theatre March 28-30, 2025
Lies, betrayal, and revenge culminate in this Greek tragedy as a passionate exploration of the depth of Medea’s pain.
Aesop’s Fables
Adapted by James Brock
Barnum Studio Theatre April 25-26, 2025
An updated version of four of the timeless storyteller’s most popular fables, Aesop’s Fables is a fast-moving play in which all the scene changes and costume adaptations are done in full view of the audience. As the various actors become the Rabbit, the Turtle, the Fox, the Crow, or the Donkey in the Lion’s skin, the audience is brought into the action of the play by seeing the change from actor to character and back to actor again. Four of Aesop’s best loved fables... ‘The Fox and the Crow,’ ‘The Hare and the Tortoise,’ ‘The Donkey In the Lion’s Skin,’ and finally, ‘The Fox and the Sour Grapes,’ are delightfully created in this interesting approach to storyteller’s theatre.
For tickets and information, go to https://events.humanitix.com/host/simpson-productions
Simpson Productions Mission Statement
Founded in 2019, Simpson Productions is an interdisciplinary, collaborative partnership between the departments of Theatre and Music at Simpson College. Previously two separate production entities, this merger of theatrical and operatic programming fosters greater creativity and connectivity across the college, allowing us to share resources, experiences and talents of students and professors alike. We seek to offer innovative and diverse programming to both the Simpson community and the greater Central Iowa region, keeping our college’s values of curiosity, discovery, and integrity at the core.
Vision
To create a unique, nationally recognized academic performance community for the study and practice of theatre, musicals, and opera.
Mission
● To present high quality productions which offer our students and audiences experiences that embrace diverse performance modes.
● To explore performance as a communication tool and form of service that can reach multiple audiences.
● To provide students various opportunities to design, perform, and create collaboratively.
Into the Woods, 2023
Central Iowa audiences can see two Silverman plays this October. Iowa Stage Theatre Company is performing Witch Oct. 4-13 at the Stoner Theatre in downtown Des Moines.
An inventive retelling of a Jacobean drama, Jen Silverman's sharp, subversive fable debates how much our souls are worth when hope is hard to come by. A charming devil arrives in the quiet village of Edmonton to bargain for the souls of its residents in exchange for their darkest wishes. Elizabeth should be his easiest target, having been labeled a “witch” and cast out by the town, but her soul is not so readily bought. As the devil returns to convince her – and then returns again –unexpected passions flare, alliances are formed, and the village is forever changed. An inventive retelling of a Jacobean drama, this sharp, subversive fable debates how much our souls are worth when hope is hard to come by.
https://www.iowastage.org/witch
About the Author
Jen Silverman (they/them) is a playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Silverman was born in Simsbury, Connecticut, but the family traveled all over the world throughout their childhood. Silverman can speak four languages.
Despite not being a theatre kid while growing up, Silverman knew they wanted to be a storyteller and was surrounded by an extensive library owned by their parents. They saw their first play in college and that’s when they started taking playwriting classes, which also included one with Paula Vogel their senior year.
Silverman completed their BA in comparative literature at Brown University, received their MFA in playwriting at the University of Iowa and an Artist Diploma at Julliard under Marsha Norman and Chris Durang. They have taught theatre and playwriting classes at the University of Iowa and at Playwrights Horizons Theater School at New York University. They also completed residencies at MacDowell Colony (three-time fellow), New Harmony, Hedgebrook, theMillay Colony for the Arts, and SPACE on Ryder Farm.
Their plays include: The Roommate (Broadway: The Booth Theatre; Regionally: Williamstown Theatre Festival, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival, Steppenwolf, South Coast Repertory Theatre, etc.); Highway Patrol (The Goodman); Spain (Second Stage Theater); Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties (Woolly Mammoth, MCC, Southwark Playhouse London); The Moors (Yale Repertory Theatre, The Playwrights Realm) and Witch (Writer’s Theatre, The Geffen, The Huntington). Books include: the debut novel We Play Ourselves, story collection The Island Dwellers and novel There’s Going to be Trouble from Random House. Silverman also wrote the bestselling narrative podcast The Miranda Obsession for Audible, starring Rachel Brosnahan.
-Faculty-
Caroline Frias
Rick Goetz
Natalie Hining
Jennifer Ross Nostrala
Costume Design/Construction; Costume Shop Supervisor; Courses in Design/Tech; Designer
Lighting and Sound Designer; Courses in Design and Tech
Scene Designer; Technical Director; Scene Shop Supervisor; Courses in Design and Tech
Simpson Productions Producer; Courses in Directing, Acting, Literature, Script Analysis; Director
Damon Stevens
Kara Raphaeli
Ann Woldt
G. Dewey and M. Maine Larsen Chair in Opera; Courses in Music History, Ensembles, Collaborative Piano, Opera; Conductor
Courses in Plays and Performances, Script Analysis; Director
Theatre Department Chair; Outreach Coordinator; Director; Courses in Acting, Voice, Arts Management, Interpretation
https://simpson.edu/academics/departments/department-theatre-arts
https://simpson.edu/academics/departments/department-music