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October 25, 2002
Valley
Impresario Brings Cole to Mount Holyoke
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Donald
T. Sanders, hooked on Thomas Cole
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The
curtain rises this week on a sparkling four-day run of Donald
T. Sanders's play-in-verse Thomas Cole, A Waking Dream.
Sanders, who is celebrated around the valley for his role as the
executive artistic director of the Massachusetts International
Festival of the Arts (MIFA), directs the play, which details the
life and work of Thomas Cole (1801–1848), founder of the
Hudson River school of painting.
Writing A Waking
Dream reawakened the playwright-director's early reverence
for Cole's work. Until he was eight years old, Sanders lived
with his grandmother, whose family was from the Hudson River area.
"She had a huge folio of lithographs of Cole's most
famous paintings," recalls Sanders. "The Oxbow, The
Voyage of Life, The Course of Empire—there was something
about them that really fascinated me."
But the 1950s, '60s,
and '70s tempered Sanders's relationship to the nineteenth-century
painter. During those decades, says Sanders, "our energy
in American art was in abstract expressionism, pop art, and then
minimalism. Other than that first childhood encounter, I really
did not know anything about Cole's life."
In 1985, the New York
Art Theatre Institute, an organization established by Sanders
and MHC Associate Professor of Theatre Arts Vanessa James to create
theatrical pieces for museums, was commissioned by the Hudson
River Museum to write a play to be performed at the museum. "Richard
Koshalek [the museum director] most likely thought we would choose
to do something on one of the contemporary artists—they were
doing a Richard Serra exhibition, for example; but they were also
doing an exhibition of Thomas Cole drawings. When we went out
to the museum to talk about what would be an appropriate theatrical
piece for the museum, Cole suddenly came back into my life."
Normally, Sanders
would have commissioned a playwright to create the piece, but
when he visited the New York Historical Society—the major
repository for Cole's papers—to begin the search for
details of the painter's life, Sanders was hooked. "They
have a room there with the Empire secretary that Cole worked at,
with his papers in it," recalls Sanders. "As soon as
I began to read about his life, I was intrigued. He was in a certain
way the first American superstar painter of the nineteenth century.
There had been more famous painters, like John Singleton Copley
and Benjamin West, but they had achieved their fame in Europe.
I realized that I wanted to write this play myself."
A director, writer,
and producer, Sanders has had works presented by the late Joseph
Papp, off-Broadway, and in New York City museums and historical
sites. His adaptations for the theatre of William Burroughs's
Naked Lunch and Edith Wharton's Old New York
were produced at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Sanders has
founded theatre companies in Chicago and New York and is a graduate
of the Yale School of Drama and the University of Bristol, England.
Waking Dream,
part of this year's MIFA season, is being performed October
24 through 26 at 8 pm and October 26 and 27 at 2 pm. Ticket prices
are $5 general admission and $3 for students and senior citizens.
Admission is free on opening night for students with identification.
Box office hours are from 3 to 6 pm daily and one hour prior to
the performance. For reservations, call x2406.
The
counter is
1,394
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