Beginning this Thursday, August 8, a Vermont theater festival called TenFest opens at Valley Players Theater in Waitsfield for the 17th year.
Each showing for the festival, which runs Thursdays and Sundays between August 8 and 18, features a series of 10-minute plays written and performed by Vermont playwrights and actors – with some local to The Valley.
Warren resident Susan Bauchner will be performing, and Bobbi Rood, Waitsfield, entered her screenplay “Pecking Order,” which was selected from among 30 submissions for the festival.
Rood and Bauchner spoke with Doug Bernstein about the production in a short segment on Mad River Valley Television called Theater Time in late July.
Rood’s play is the story of a dominant rooster who pushes a hen around. She said she wrote it after observing the dynamics among her chickens at home. “I had a ninth-grade teacher who said ‘write what you know about,’” she told Bergstein.
“It has a little bit to do with bullying, and how to cope with a bully,” she said, as well as “freedom to choose what you do with your own body, and how others treat you.”
The themes of this year’s festival are freedom and unity.
“It’s got to be fun for the actors, I would think, to be giving it their all to play a rooster or a hen,” Bergstein said. Rood replied that such a production can also push the director to experiment with the different ways that human actors can portray animals.
Rood will also be performing in two of the other 10 plays, including one absurdist production called “The Real Housewives of Vermont,” by David Carkeet – a deadpan script where, in terms of storytelling, “the challenge is to keep it flowing,” Rood said. “Body language matters a lot.”
TenFest is an annual production of the Vermont Playwrights Circle – a statewide group of playwrights who meet virtually to perform and give feedback on each other’s plays. “We show up each month and brings those words off the page for the playwrights,” Bauchner said.
Bauchner will be performing in “Sisterhood” this year – a script written by Virginia Lahl in which three sisters work to take back the ashes of their mother, after their father, who was separated from their mother, gets his hands on them.
Bob Carmody of Charlotte, Vermont, who also spoke to Bergstein in the MRVTV segment, will be directing a play called “Widows Unite,” written by Vermont House Representative Conor Casey.
Carmody said that he spoke with Casey via email about the script, especially because he needed approval to change the ending, which Casey agreed to.
In another play, Carmody will be performing, playing an unhoused man who used to be a university professor, he said.
Carmody has long participated in the festival – involved for at least 10 years. He said he loves that TenFest is a production of local writers, actors, and directors.
TenFest tickets can be purchased by calling 802-583-1674 or by emailing name, phone number, and number/type of tickets and day of show to
Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sundays.
