From the imagination of writer Melanie Hoopes of Hastings comes “Kindness Committee,” a new play that explores the question, “What do those people in the audience really think about?”
Presented by RiverArts, the play will be performed on Friday, March 18 and Saturday, March 19 at 7 p.m., at South Presbyterian Church in Dobbs Ferry.
The cast consists of Ed Herbstman of Hastings, who is Hoopes’ husband; Hastings High School grad Anna Aubry of Brooklyn; Blake Brewer of Manhattan; Michelle Concha of Ossining; Mark Gessner of Harrison; Gregory Jones of Hastings; and Sweta Keswani of Tarrytown. The co-producers are Lauren Orkus of Sleepy Hollow and Marie-Louise Miller of Hastings.
“Kindness Committee” was inspired by a concert that Hoopes attended in 2018 by Bay Area singer-songwriter John Elliott, who was performing at a Common Ground Coffeehouse, the music series then based at the First Unitarian Society of Westchester in Hastings.
“It was just a night out,” Hoopes said in an interview on Feb. 25. “I went and I just was really moved by him. His music is so simple and so true, and he’s very open about all sorts of feelings and thoughts.”
When she left the concert, the afterglow it created lingered.
“His breathtakingly honest and personal songwriting awed me,” she said. “He exposes his regrets and defenses, no matter how misshapen or how ugly, but then treats his past with kindness and compassion. He sends the audience off to do an inventory of their own, with the same open-hearted approach.”
She wondered how the other audience members experienced that performance. So she wrote a story, based only upon her own imagination, about the thoughts of the woman who sat in front of her at the concert. “It was about her experience of love,” she said. “Then, I just didn’t stop. I wrote about 12 different people and their experiences listening to the show.”
Hoopes thought about turning the stories into a podcast, but when RiverArts asked her to create a play, she turned seven of the stories into monologues. She finished the script before she contacted Elliott about the play inspired by his music.
“I got back in touch with John, and I said, ‘I don’t want to freak you out, but I just wrote this play based on this concert of yours that I saw,’” Hoopes recounted. Elliott agreed to contribute music for her play, in the form of backing tracks from his recordings.
Elliott plans to be in the audience at the play, and then perform at a Common Ground concert on Saturday, March 26 at 7:30 p.m., also at South Church. Common Ground’s usual performance space at the Unitarian Church is no longer available due to flood damage Hurricane Ida caused last fall.
Hoopes’ play, set first at a concert in a church on a cold winter night, and then the next day during church services, presents the ruminations of a handful of audience members, all connected by various degrees to one another. They silently confess their longings and forebodings, their pasts and their hopes for the future. They worry about society, politics, and the environment.
The play is “a treatise on community…,” Hoopes said. “The survival of all beings and our beautiful planet depends on the strength of our relation to one another.”
The title of the play, “Kindness Committee,” refers to an actual committee at the fictional church where the play takes place, but it also makes one wonder whether it takes an official committee for people to be kind to one another.
It’s not unusual to meet people dealing with weighty subjects in a Hoopes production. She created a cast of characters rubbed raw by the pandemic in an earlier play for RiverArts, “Six Feet: A Play About What’s Between Us,” which was performed over Zoom in October 2020.
“Melanie’s writing holds a special combination of insight, depth, and compassion,” RiverArts artistic director Kate Ashby said. “She interweaves the experiences of her characters in a way that is sure to resonate with our audiences, leading us all to consider ways we can make our world and our community a better place.”
Hoopes has written for radio, TV, and the stage. In 2019, she presented “Modernizing the Radio Drama” as part of the “Local Luminaries” series at the Hastings Public Library. She also produces and hosts “Yesteryear: Stories from Home,” an occasional podcast about the history of village life on the Hudson River.
DETAILS:
Friday March 18, 2022
Saturday March 19, 2022
Time: 7:00pm
South Presbyterian Church
343 South Broadway, Dobbs Ferry NY
Tickets: $25.00
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