Gerry Bartholomai, of Chamblee, GA, is the author of tonight’s Bare Essentials offering, Miss Adelia’s Garden. Miss Adelia’s Garden is a poignant drama about the friendship between a young gay man and two elderly southern women.
Tell us a little bit about your play.
Miss Adelia’s Garden is the story of Adelia and Martha – two lifelong friends who live a rather secluded life in a small town in Georgia.
What inspired you to write this play?
It started with a dream I had. In it, I was back in my grandmother’s house in the mountains of Cordoba. For some reason Shirley MacLaine and Olympia Dukakis were with me. The three of us were out in the garden frantically searching for our friend Adelia who had wandered off. We were worried because it was late at night and cold and windy. I woke up thinking about the dream. I wondered who this Adelia was. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, the ideas started flowing. I wrote everything down on post-its I had nearby. The following day I organized the notes. Slowly things started coming together. A few weeks later I had a first draft of Miss Adelia’s Garden.
How did you get into writing plays?
Although I’ve been passionate about the theater since I was a child, I didn’t start writing plays until around eight years ago. In school I trained to write mostly for TV and movies. For quite some time I wrote mostly screenplays. Then I started coming up with characters and stories that fit better in the theatrical format. As I watched – and read- more theater I realized writing plays could be, narratively speaking, freer, richer and much more interesting. Film and TV are great mediums, but I feel the power of theater – an art that has been with us since the time of the Greeks – is still unsurpassable.
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Miss Adelia’s Garden will be read at the West End Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, August 5 at 7:30pm.
Directed by Scott Rousseau and featuring the reading talents of Sylvia Davenport-Veith, Bobbie Elzey and Michael Howell.
All readings are free and open to the public, donations gladly accepted.
