Hear the Voice, Be the Verse

The words of Emily Brontë appear in a new play opening today in Harrisburg, PA:

Gamut Theatre presents
Hear the Voice, Be the Verse
An Adaptation by Franklin L. Henley Jr.
Friday, December 11 and Saturday, December 12 at 7:30 p.m.

Also features an accompanying art exhibition, featuring works inspired by the poets whose work appears in the performance. Featured Artists Include:
Shane Patrick Gallup, Ryan Spahr, Liz Laribee, Andrew Sedgewick Guth, Jeremy Patterson, Margaret Morris and Reina 76 Artist.

Hear the Voice, Be the Verse includes works by William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Shakespeare, Emily Brontë, Rudyard Kipling, and many others. The piece is adapted by Frank Henley, who has been seen on stage in Harrisburg Shakespeare Company performances of  Macbeth, King John, The Lion in Winter and as the title role in Othello. One of Henley’s goals for Hear the Voice is that the inherent connection between poetry and the human voice is illuminated through this production.

“In my very early teens, theatre and poetry became the vehicles of self-expression that opened up the wider world to me,” Henley explains. “I remember watching a documentary on PBS about the career of Sir John Geilgud. In this film, Sir John was standing on a bare stage reciting Shakespeare's sonnets. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard in my life, and ever since, I have always felt that there is an unbreakable bond between theatre and poetry. That poetry should be recited first, read second. That poetry is at its best when it is transmitted through the human voice rather than through the static page.”

Henley also hopes that audiences feel the relevance that these pieces still carry in modern times.

“This production highlights not only the timelessness of these works of literature, but their universality,” Henley says. “That these poems are strands in the invisible threads of the human condition that began when our earliest ancestors that recited poems to each other around the nightly fire unto this very day.”