Tag: Appalachian Center for the Arts

The Appalachian Center for the Arts will be hosting a special performance of Love Letters, Tuesday, Oct. 8th beginning at 7:30 p.m.

Love Letters, by award-winning playwright A.R. Gurney, is the story of Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner. Childhood friends whose lifelong correspondence begins with birthday party thank-you notes and summer camp postcards. Their 50-year relationship is told through their letters, and is sure to touch your heart.

Tickets are $15 at the door. This show is a fundraiser for The Appalachian Center for the Arts.

Featured Talent

Abigail Bailey Maupin works regularly with Kentucky Shakespeare, where she has taken on a wide swath of roles, including Lady Macbeth, Beatrice, Kate, Olivia, Gertrude, and Speed, among others, and had the great honor of traveling to Stratford-upon-Avon with a small contingent from the company to perform at Shakespeare’s birthplace and on the BBC for the anniversary celebration in 2016. She and her husband Greg co-founded Le Petomane Theatre Ensemble, with whom she created/performed in over twenty plays; some favorites: the title role in Molière’s Don Juan, a country music-singing Emily Dickinson, Mrs. Judy Punch, Twelfth Night’s Viola, the sidekick to both a superhero and a supervillain, and a faded Southern belle incarnation of Death named Blanche DuNoir.

Abigail started playing make-believe professionally at the age of seven, received a BFA in Musical Theatre (with a concentration in Directing) from the Boston Conservatory, and paid lots of dues during her eleven years in New York City. Her regional and New York credits include: Sweeney Todd (Goodspeed Opera House); Babes & Dudes, Die Like a Lady (NY International Fringe Festival); Iolanthe (Village Light Opera Group, NYC); Gift of the Magi (Vermont Stage Company), Hansel and Gretel (Theatreworks/USA). In Louisville, she has appeared with Actors Theatre, MTL/Stage One, Derby Dinner Playhouse, Theater 502, Savage Rose, and as Mabel in her dad’s favorite Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Pirates of Penzance, at Iroquois Amphitheatre (directed by her husband – there was no nepotism involved, she swears). She currently uses her vocal talents for evil, narrating audiobooks at the Printing House for the Blind and singing Prohibition-era ukulele songs as half of the musical duo Rannygazoo.

Gregory Maupin is text coach/dramaturg and an actor for Kentucky Shakespeare. He and his wife Abigail are weird Prohibition ukulele duo Rannygazoo, co-wrote a play for young audiences, The Glorious Adventures of the Mighty Robin Hood, and narrate audiobooks for the American Printing House for the Blind. In 2004 they co-founded Le Petomane Theatre Ensemble, as part of which he co-created something like twenty productions, designed and built dozens of commedia masks, adapted three Shakespeares and a Moliere, and portrayed a melodramatic supervillain, a scientific North Pole elf, sort-of-Ebenezer-Scrooge-but-really-Hunter-S.-Thompson, a record store dude, and Thomas Edison, among many others. He is also a charter member of Brooklyn’s Under the Table Ensemble, a graduate of Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre, and has degrees in English and Theatre from the University of Louisville. He dedicates this performance to the late Kathi E.B. Ellis, who directed him in Love Letters when he was too young to know any better.

Kentucky Shakespeare appearances include: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Guildenstern), Much Ado About Nothing (Benedick), Twelfth Night (Malvolio) Taming of the Shrew (Petruchio), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Bottom), As You Like It (Touchstone), Two Gentlemen of Verona (Launce), Macbeth (Porter), and Dark Lady of the Sonnets (William Shakespeare), as well as two pieces (with Abigail) for the Shakespeare Without Words program, performed at various immigrant/refugee centers throughout Louisville.

Actors Theatre of Louisville appearances include: Luna Gale (Cliff), At the Vanishing Point (Martin), Our Town (Simon Stimson), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Flute), Macbeth (Various), 43 Plays for 43 Presidents (Washington, Coolidge…oh, bunches of them). With the Dell’Arte Company: Vaudeville (co-creator).