Crowded Kitchen Players will present their original play, "Smile, Smile, Smile: A Remembrance of The Great War" at The Charles A. Brown IceHouse May 12 -14, 2017 on Sand Island in Bethlehem, PA.
"Smile, Smile, Smile" is an unromantic look into the personal sacrifices of war and the folly of nations that wage them in the wake of failed diplomacy.
The play is adapted from the writings of World War 1 poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, along with the verse of Vera Brittain and A.E. Housman. It interweaves the action and dialogue with popular songs of the era that served to recruit fresh troops for the four years-long conflict and, later, to decry the loss of so many young lives.
The setting is a grassy hill aside lush fields in western France on a sunny day many years after the War has ended. Three couples are enjoying a lazy picnic lunch when one of them stumbles upon a weathered helmet, which immediately stimulates a lively discussion of the meadow on which they have inadvertently chosen to spend the afternoon.
In the course of their banter, they begin to transform themselves, playfully at first, into the men and women who had fought and suffered and died there. Soon, they are fully immersed in the deafening chaos and horror of the conflict itself.
Passages from the original poems have been juxtaposed in ways that play as if the characters are engaged in frantic and often shattering conversations with one another before, during, and following savage field battles and deafening bombardments.
Six actors portray a variety of characters in the story: from soldiers fighting and dying in the trenches, family members on the home front, Red Cross nurses, vaudeville performers, and general civilians whose culture and way of life were torn from beneath them.
-Survivors exchange gruesome post-battle 'shop-talk' with their fallen comrades as well as with their fallen foes.
-Family members share poignant letters from the Front with neighbors and friends.
-A drill instructor laments his role in sending the insufficiently trained youths to their deaths abroad.
-Field nurses work tirelessly to salvage broken bodies and ravaged souls.
-Returning veterans apprise old companions of the once unspeakable realities of the conflict.
-A young woman eulogizes her twenty-year old fiance, killed by a sniper's bullet.
Poets,Sassoon, Owen, and Brooke fought in the War, which raged from 1914 to 1918. Of the three, only Sassoon survived it, living nearly another fifty years.
Some of the more familiar poems include Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est', a bitter rebuke of Horace's line, 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' (The greatest and most wonderful honor is to die for one's country), and Brooke's 'The Great Lover', in which a soldier resigned to his fate to die on a foreign battlefield thinks back upon all that he has loved and cherished in his brief life prior to the War.
The play was inspired by the Centenary of America's entry into World War 1 on April 6, 1917, and by the present saber-rattling in Asia and The Middle East.
Director Ara Barlieb created the script.
Cast members include Crowded Kitchen Players veterans Tom Harrison, Pamela McLean Wallace, Todd Carpien, Suzy Barr Hoffman, Brian Keller, and Stephanie Steigerwalt.
"Smile Smile Smile" will play Friday May 12 and Saturday May 13 at 8PM and Sunday May 14 at 2PM. All tickets are $15. A reception in the theater will follow each performance.
The Charles A. Brown IceHouse, Sand Island, 56 River Street, Bethlehem, PA.
For directions and information, please visit www.ckplayers.com, call 610.395.7176, or email