Occupy Spoon River: Margaret Kitterman and Douglas Kampsen

By Douglas Kampsen

Cast: Various (9m, 9f or more)Basic Unit Set Occupy Spoon River, the award-winning one-act play, celebrates the human spirit and the healing power of free speech. It seamlessly integrates the poetry from Edgar Lee Masters' classic Spoon River Anthology and real-life stories from the Occupy Movement. This play takes an intimate look at one group of protesters from the "We are the 99%" campaign in the small town of Spoon River. The audience is taken on a touching and powerful journey of struggle, determination and hope as the protesters share their stories of why they occupy. With a sense of great urgency, this play takes place at 11:40 p.m., twenty minutes before the mayor has declared that the protesters will be arrested if they do not leave the park. Will free speech survive? "At once educational and entertaining, timely and timeless, Occupy Spoon River is an original blend of modern prose with the early twentieth century poetry of Edgar Lee Masters. The script is a unique collaboration between two other writers with Midwestern roots: Margaret Kitterman, who witnessed the protests of the 60s and 70s, and Douglas Kampsen, who has studied the Occupy Wall Street Movement first hand. In the tradition of Masters' masterpiece, Occupy Spoon River successfully and fearlessly brings together a desparate cast of characters who are not only interesting as ordinary individuals, but who ultimately form a community connected by the pathos of their common condition in hard economic times. The haunting characters carefully selected from Masters' Anthology combine with energetic characters representative of the Occupy protesters to produce a singular, unified perspective on the resilience and courage of ordinary human beings who have been pushed too far. The take-away for the audience is a cathartic affirmation of renewed hope for social and economic justice. The greatest payoff, however, is for the new generation of actors who get the opportunity to internalize the kind of empathy for "others" which is in short supply in "Me First" America. In that respect, Occupy Spoon River has the potential to be a transformative work of art."Dale L. NeuschwanderInstructor of English and Speech CommunicationsSt. Cloud State University

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1470085550
• ISBN13: 9781470085551
• Release Date: February 2012
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 26 Pages
• Weight: 0.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.1" x 5.0"