Beyond the frame

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Artistic inspiration can come from just about anywhere. For playwright Teresa Pesce, it came after looking at a selection of paintings by local artists. From their images she conjured up characters and settings — whole relationships — that ultimately resulted in five one-act plays that explore her interpretation of what is happening both inside and outside the frame. 

“Kitty” by Patricia Ragone.

Presented by the Pend Oreille Arts Council and Panida Theater under the overall title Art as Theater and due to appear on the Panida stage Friday-Sunday, June 25-27 each 15- to 20-minute play conjures a world in miniature, packed with meaning.

Pesce calls it “sequential magic” — a multimedia melding of visual, performance and musical art.

“An artist imagines and projects an image; a writer imagines and projects that into a story,” she said. “The director brings the magic, the actors bring it to the stage and the music projects all of it.”

While Pesce wrote and directed each of the plays, the music has been provided by Dave Gunter and Dave Hussey, a.k.a., The Paranormal Daves, who have created an all-original score based on their interpretations of the pieces. The artwork — so critical to the production — came from POAC artists Suzanne Jewell, Scott Kirby, Patricia Ragone and Connie Scherr.

Each piece, with three from Ragone, will be projected on a screen above the stage to imprint the visual inspiration for the dramatic act in the audience’s mind before the players begin their own work. The visuals — which include the slideshow and only special effect, an introductory video projection of an artist’s hand painting “art as theater” — were provided by Russ Sabin.

“The Bridge” by Connie Scherr.

Pesce is enthusiastic about the work her actors have put in, noting that while some names will be familiar to Sandpoint theatergoers, several others are brand new.

Tari Pardini, Ron Ragone, Ashley Shalbreck and Dean Thomas are all veteran area performers, but in their debut local roles are Kelly Draggoo, Ashley Lopez, Frytz Mor and Joe Woodruff. 

“They are astonishing. They’re just astonishing in their ability,” said Pesce. “The people in the theater world should come out and see this and see these amazing new finds that are in fact recent arrivals.”

The entries in Art as Theater are “like espresso,” she said — short but powerful snapshots of individuals at specific moments in their lives.

The play Taxi came from Pesce’s associations with Ragone’s painting “Taxi,” which features a young woman stepping out of a cab on a busy city street. Pesce wondered why she would be stepping out of a taxi, and from there flowed a story about a daughter going to find her father, who left when she was 2 months old. If audiences expect a pat, tidy ending, they’ll be surprised.

Elvis Has Left the Building took as its cue Kirby’s piece “Nocturnal Barnscape” — a wistful image of the interior of a red-painted barn. There are boards missing from the walls and roof, while no glass remains in the windows. A single light bulb on the far wall casts a conical point of illumination opposite a vast door that opens on a nighttime scene: a road winding off into the distance through darkened fields dominated by a star-pocked sky and crescent moon. A shimmer of light along the horizon suggests either a distant city or the final tired moments of the gloaming after a long, hot day.

“Taxi” by Patricia Ragone.

From that piece, Pesce wrote a play about a mother with alzheimers and her children’s differing ideas about how to approach the fact she is “anywhere but where she is.”

Of the five plays, Pesce said Furry Friends, inspired by Patricia Ragone’s works “Kitty” and “Taz,” is the most lighthearted. The portraits of a vibrant blue-eyed cat and a friendly pup inspired in Pesce the notion of two pets who help their owner find true love. She promised that the actor who plays the dog — Mor — “will steal every scene, and that’s just fine.”

Three Houses is based on Jewell’s piece titled “The Green Shed.” Pesce said that looking at the painting, which depicts a number of sloping roofs in descending height from a house at center-frame, “triggered the thought of a family” — the two smaller structural elements representing children who have built their own lives while the larger structure stands as their mother, who no matter what will always be “home.”

For The Bridge, Pesce took as her inspiration a painting of the same name by Scherr that depicts a red wooden bridge spanning a creek somewhere in the forest. In the play, two friends meet on the bridge at a series of critical junctures — from childhood to adulthood and (literally) beyond. 

“The Green Shed’ by Suzanne Jewell.

“The plays are really about the arcs of relationships,” Pesce said. “The dialogue is not canned; it is not trite, it is not even expected. … It’s not sitcom characters; it’s real people.”

True to its title, Art as Theater is intended to be as stripped down as possible to focus exclusively on the art and the theater it has inspired. The set consists of a basic living room scene, which will be used for every play, other than in The Bridge — of course, taking place on a bridge. 

Pesce described it as akin to “a black-box approach,” referring to a form of theater space typified by its simplicity: four black walls and a floor, focusing all the audience’s attention on the actors’ performances.

“It’s character-driven, it doesn’t rely on the set,” she said. “I wanted them [the audience] to be focused on the work of art — to have that in their mind, then the story plays out via the characters. It’s not about the set.” 

After many years as a contributor to the local theater scene, Pesce feels the time is right for a resurgence, as more and more new residents come to the Sandpoint area, bringing their talents and showing up to the theater as audience members. 

“These are the wonderful blessings to the growth of a town — there’s new businesses that can open, more restaurants, more art galleries, more opportunities,” she said. 

“Nocturnal Barnscape” by Scott Kirby.

One of those opportunities, which Pesce hopes might be expressed with the mingling of longtime local stage actors and newcomers in Art as Theater, is the cultivation of a new wave of arts leaders — “someone else to put their shoulder to the wheel and put Sandpoint on the map.”

“I would love to see unity with the arts,” she said. “We want people to know how talented Sandpoint is and this is a fantastic time to do it.”

“Taz” by Patricia Ragone.