Photo by Kathy Dollyhigh
The mission of the North Carolina Humanities Council is to serve as an advocate for lifelong learning and thoughtful dialogue about all facets of human life and to facilitate the exploration and celebration of the many voices and stories of North Carolina’s cultures and heritage. Look Back the Maytime Days exemplifies this mission in every way, and I recommend it to you highly.
—Shelly Crisp, Executive Director, North Carolina Humanities Council
About the Kinfolk Series
- Play Overview
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- Reviews
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- About the Kinfolk Series
As a means of offering events designed to connect with a wide variety of people, Touring Theatre has initiated a series entitled Kinfolk which features individual productions centering on family, based on work by prominent North Carolina writers. These productions provide a stimulus for post-performance conversations. As poet and author Fred Chappell states: Writing about family is a way for the poet to approach history, politics, culture, and so forth with intense and personally engaged language. The poet has a real stake in the past that gave rise to his or her sensibility, for out of that past is shaped an encounter with a present time and a vision of time to come.
The first two of the Kinfolk Series productions, Look Back the Maytime Days: from the Pages of Fred Chappell and Lee Smith's "Tongues of Fire” (coming in Spring 2012) illustrate exactly Mr. Chappell's observation on the subject of families. Both demonstrate the writer's stake in the past that gave rise to his/her own sensibilities and encounters with the present in terms of religion, class, ethnicity, psychology and gender.
These original, staged adaptations of North Carolina writers are frequently followed by scholar/author facilitated conversations that provide audiences with opportunities to compare and comment, share and relate incidences from their own family's store of experiences and in doing so find a safe and easy way to reach across ethnic, religious and class divides.
