Lovey Calamity is a theatrical production company that creates immersive, site-specific theatrical experiences which compliment or inform the real-world spaces they inhabit. Our immersive approach helps us breathe new life into a wide breadth of material– from original works to classical adaptations, to experimental happenings. We believe art can strengthen community and foster connections between people and places. Lovely Calamity is committed to making theatre an integral part of the cultural landscape of our community. We prioritize collaborations with local artists, organizations, and businesses. Lovely Calamity Productions is an equal opportunity employer and a home for artists of all identities, races, ages, and cultures. We welcome anyone who feels they have something to contribute. Learn more at lovelycalamity.com
Sleepy Hollow Arts Collective (SHAC) is committed to providing accessible arts education to residents of Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown. The Arts Collective works to produce, promote, and perform art across a variety of disciplines— from poetry to puppetry, and from drama to drag. SHAC is dedicated to providing a home for a variety of artists, regardless of race, ethnicity, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or economic status. To learn more about SHAC, or to donate, please visit their website at sleepyarts.org
“I send to you herewith a plan of a rural cemetery projected by some of the worthies of tarrytown on the woody hills adjacent to the Sleepy Hollow Church. I have no pecuniary interest in it, yet I hope it may succeed, as it will keep that beautiful and umbrageous neighborhood sacred from the anti-poetical and all leveling axe. Besides, I trust that I shall one day lay my bones there.”
-- Washington Irving
Incorporated in 1849, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is an active, non-profit, non-sectarian burial ground occupying approximately 90 acres of space. It is the final resting place of some 47,000 souls, including Washington Irving who first brought notoriety to the area with the 1820 American publication of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. Other famous interments include Andrew Carnegie, William Rockefeller, Elizabeth Arden, Brooke Astor, Jasper Cropsey, Leona Helmsley, Walter Chrysler, Belle Moskowitz, Samuel Gompers, and Oswald Garrison Villard.
While Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is adjacent to the Old Dutch Church Burying Ground, which dates back to 1607, the two properties are separate institutions. Today, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is on the National register of Historic Places and is a level one arboretum.
We ask that visitors be mindful of the sacred nature of the setting they are exploring this evening. Kindly refrain from touching or in any way disturbing any of the monuments, headstones, and statuary that you see while traversing the grounds and always remain on the path.
Tours of the property are available at: sleepyhollowcemetery.org
An Homage to the Poet...
Our play would not exist were it not for the genius of the poet Edgar Lee Masters.
Born in Garnett, Kansas in 1868, Masters’ early years were difficult ones. His family struggled financially as his father’s law practice floundered and they were forced to move several times, finally settling in Lewistown, Illinois in 1880. Here, a young Masters attended high school and had his first poems and articles published in local papers including the Chicago Daily News. Masters wanted to pursue a literary career but was discouraged by his parents, who instead steered Edgar into a career in the law. After being admitted to the Illinois bar, Masters moved to Chicago and established a law partnership with Clarence Darrow (of Scopes “monkey” trial fame). The two men worked together until 1911 when Masters left to start his own firm. However, his interest in writing—and in poetry in particular— never waned. He published a great many plays, poems and essays while working as an attorney, but tended to write under pseudonyms, wary of damaging his legal career.
Then, in 1914, at the suggestion of his friend and publisher William Marion Reedy, Masters began work on a series of poems based on his childhood in Illinois. He wandered through Oak Hill Cemetery, gathering names off tombstones, remembering the people he had known in his youth, and crafting poems based on their exploits. Masters combined various poetic forms, mixing classical techniques with experimental ones to create an anthology wherein the dead return to recite their epitaphs in free verse. Some of these poems were first published as stand-alone works in the St. Louis-based literary magazine Reedy’s Mirror. In 1915, all 212 original poems were assembled into a single volume and prepared for publication. Masters named his collection after the river that meandered through Lewistown, on whose banks he had so often played as a child, and Spoon River Anthology was born.
Literary fashion of the late 19th century often presented small town life as idyllic and wholesome. Small towns, it was supposed, were bastions of “real” American values. Masters begged to differ. His ghostly subjects were adulterers, thieves, liars. They died of botched abortions, suicide, alcoholism. The frankness with which Masters dared to write about even the most taboo of topics of the age made his poetry scandalous, and wildly popular. Spoon River proved both a commercial and critical success, garnering praise from the likes of Ezra Pound who famously said of Masters, “At last America has discovered a poet.”
But back in Illinois, the residents of Lewistown were not pleased. They recognized themselves and their loved ones in Masters’ poetry and resented having the carefully crafted façade over their bucolic community torn down. The citizenry was so perturbed, in fact, that Spoon River Anthology was banned in Lewistown schools and libraries until 1974! In recent years, however, Lewistown has come to accept and even celebrate its notoriety. Today, a memorial statue of Edgar Lee Masters graces his grave in Oak Hill Cemetery and, perhaps unsurprisingly, his stone bears an epitaph that the poet himself composed. It reads:
“Good friends, let’s to the fields…
After a little walk, and by your pardon,
I think I’ll sleep. There is no sweeter thing,
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.
I am a dream out of a blessed sleep –
Let’s walk and hear the lark.”