PORT ANGELES — This year’s Peninsula College Find Your Voice Festival creative team has woven together monologues submitted for this year’s production to create a tapestry of revelation, tears and laughter, organizers said.
Set at a wake in 1994 at a San Francisco North Beach bar, “I Never Told Anyone (But I’m Going to Tell You)” opens at 6:30 tonight at Studio Bob, 118½ E. Front St.
It will be performed Fridays and Saturdays through April 1. Tickets will be available at the door for $10.
“Ask writers to tell a story they never told anyone (but they’ll tell you),” said this year’s creative director, Karen Hogan, “set the storytelling at a not-very-ordinary wake for a most unusual person and you get an evening of stories that will break your heart, then mend it with laughter.”
Under the artistic direction of Lara Starcevich, drama department head, the PC Find Your Voice Festival has evolved into a dynamic event that gives current and former students, as well as community members, the opportunity to take the words of the writer from page to stage.
Out of the 42 submissions, the creative team narrowed the field to the 15 that will be performed at Studio Bob.
The emphasis this year has been on collaboration between the writer, director and actor. Marissa Lee Ann Wilson, director of the monologue “Dear 15-Year-Old-Self,” and her actor, Tia Stephens, met over dinner with the author, Tasha Burch.
“This monologue speaks to me. Learning the backstory to Tasha’s piece, discovering how she came to tell the story, gave me the opportunity to develop a richer, deeper performance,” Stephens said. “I know it helped Tasha find her voice. It helped me find mine as well.”
Wilson and Stephens are both former students at Peninsula College.
One of this year’s writers, student Darryl Hayes (“The First Song”), found the experience particularly liberating.
“The very name of the festival, Find Your Voice, gave me courage to speak out loud,” Hayes said.
“I’m prepared to dance a dance that gets others moving as this wave of enchantment gives way to freedom.”
The festival introduces another level of collaboration this year with the addition of live music. Sequim resident Tom Darter is providing improvised piano music behind the monologues. Darter, a composer, has played on Jerry Goldsmith film scores and arranged and adapted all the material on the Kronos Quartet albums Monk Suite and Music of Bill Evans.
For more information, email Hogan at karenlhogan@me.com.
