Sunday, September 27, 2009

Nighthawks have Landed!


Finally available after many delays and difficulties, neoNuma Arts is quite pleased to present to the world a trade paperback edition of the play, Nighthawks by Evan Guilford-Blake. Above is the front and back cover, the latter so you can see for yourself the type of reviews this fine play gets when it is produced. Below are two blurbs that were given to me but I ended up not using. They are longer recommendations from previous directors of the play. After you've read them, please consider adding Nighthawks to your drama library, either from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

Our theatre department produced Nighthawks by Evan Blake in 1999. Several factors influenced our selection of the script, but most important was the acting work it provided for our students. This one-act offers four fine roles, which are challenging, yet within the range of freshmen and sophomore actors. An added benefit was the cross-disciplinary connections our production made with art history and humanities students on campus, who had studied the works of Edward Hopper. Our set reproduced the buildings and the cafe in the Hopper's painting; the faculty had their students write about our three-dimensional version of the painting, how art (Hopper's) inspires art (Blake’s), and provided a springboard for diversity discussions.

Sheilah A. Philip
Professor of Theatre, Academic Coordinator for Theatre
Johnson County Community College
Overland Park, KS

I found this play to be a heartbreaking evocation of isolation and loneliness at the center of every human heart. Evan painstakingly delineates his wounded midnight characters reaching out to connect with one another, sometimes violently, sometimes yearningly. His ultimate lesson? Reach out, hold on; none of us can traverse this journey of life alone; our emptiness can only be filled by others of our kind through mutual caring. We must shoulder each others' burdens.

The action moves from the dark, stormy, early-morning hours of despair to a slow-breaking dawn of hope.

Glenn Meche
Theater Director
New Orleans, LA
(see more about Meche's production of the play here.)

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home