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Millworker to be featured at NC Museum of
Art
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| The cast and crew of Millworker |
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| CCCC Students
Meredith LeRoy, Charity Somersette, Amy Brooks
and Jocelyn
Dudek recount life in a mill village
during the college’s play, Millworker. |
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| Alice Zincone, Kerstin Lindgren, and Tommy
Edwards promote mill life on The Dixieland Family
Hour radio
show during the CCCC
play, Millworker |
Sanford, NC – Millworker, the critically acclaimed
play featuring Central Carolina Community College (CCCC)
students, will be featured in a special performance in
Raleigh on Saturday, September 18, 2004 at 8:00 p.m. at
the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Named one of the top ten theatre performances in 2003 by the News and Observer,
Millworker is a critically acclaimed grassroots show features poignant, humorous,
painful and fascinating real-life accounts of the lives of early NC textile workers. The
play is combined with beautiful traditional music performed by well-known Chatham
County artists.
CCCC Instructor and Director Ellen Bland developed the show with co-writer Drew
Lasater from the Southern Oral History Book, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern
Cotton Mill World by Jacquelyn Dowd-Hall and others. The book is a collection
of oral history interviews of over 300 southern textile workers.
Bland and Lasater wove together many of those speeches into a unique work of
theatre centering on an old-time live radio show. The production started
as a one-night performance in Pittsboro’s old Chatham Mills Building and
ended as a hug success after a tour of mill communities across North Carolina.
The News and Observer’s Dennis Rogers said Millworker “knocked him
out of his socks.” The Independent Weekly’s Byron Woods
included it in the paper’s Best Bets, recommending it as a “fierce
work of memory,” and the Village Rambler magazine proclaimed, “Millworker
is excellent, prime, high grade, exception and superb. Words fail to capture
what it is to experience this performance.”
CCCC students and faculty play mill workers, giving detailed accounts of life
in turn of the century textile mills and mill villages in the rural South. Local
artists, such as The Bluegrass Experience’s Tommy Edwards, Big Medicine’s
Jim Collier, The Shelby’s Virginia Ryan and Singer/Songwriter Alice Zincone
perform original and traditional music that reflects mill life.
Tickets for the special performance are on sale now through September 18, 2004,
at a cost of $10 and are available through the North Carolina Museum of Art box
office at (919) 715-5923 or through Ticketmaster at www.ticketmaster.com.
Media Contact:
Andy Sawyer
Central Carolina Community College
(919) 718-7265
asawyer@cccc.edu |
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