“Kids bring their favorite books to life in new play festival”
The Manton Avenue Project (MAP) is stagin its next production, Once Upon A Time: The Favorite Book Play Festival.
Performances will take place at 7pm on Thursday and Friday, and 2pm on Saturday and Sunday.
The Manton Avenue Project (MAP) is a non-profit organization that unites children living in Providence’s Olneyville neighborhood with local theater professionals to create original plays together. The Manton Avenue Project’s mission is to nurture the unique potential of young people living in Olneyville by unleashing their creative voices through playmaking. Each of MAP’s out-of-school time programs is focused on playwriting education, mentorship, and bringing kids’ plays to the stage.
Once Upon a Time: The Favorite Book Play Festival is the culminating production of The Manton Avenue Project’s PLAY-IT-AGAIN program, an afterschool playwriting course held at MAP’s Clubhouse in Olneyville. Ten 4th and 5th grade playwrights will each write a play based on or inspired by their favorite books and literary characters. For this project, The Manton Avenue Project partnered with the Rhode Island Center for the Book and the Providence Community Library. The resulting play festival will feature adult actors and be directed by guest artists from various cultural institutions and theatre companies across the city and state.
“The Manton Avenue Project is proud to present The Favorite Book Play Festival! Our Play-it-Again course challenged MAP’s young playwrights to devise plays adapted from their favorite books. We discussed the books that have made the most impact in our lives and visited our community library as a group to rediscover some of those books,” says Executive Artistic Director Meg Sullivan. “Each young playwright will create a play that reimagines those stories onstage. Our goal is to show young people in Olneyville the value of their voices and, through our ongoing and tuition-free playwriting programs, help them reach their full potential as creative thinkers and community leaders.”
This is the second production of The Manton Avenue Project’s 2016-2017 season, which is supported by a grant from June Rockwell Levy Foundation, The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, The Rhode Island Council on the Humanities, Nordson Corporation Foundation, Providence Rotary Charities Foundation, United Way of Rhode Island, as well as many other individual donors.