Last month was the opening of Art2Art 2016: Canvasing the Stage at the Abingdon Theatre Company. This was my third year participating in Art2Art and my second year at Abingdon, and it was such a pleasure to work with such a fantastic theatre. Art2Art is meant to give teen artists an opportunity create their own interpretation of plays. This year, the play we worked with was A Room of My Own, written and directed by Charles Messina, starring Mario Cantone and Ralph Macchio.

To begin, we met at the Abingdon and were each given a copy of the play’s script. We chose roles and sat around a table as we read our parts out loud, getting into our characters. We had a great time trying to pronounce the phonetically spelled Italian slang and we all really enjoyed the story. The following week we got to see the cast perform the play to an audience of critics and we were able to see our parts come to life on stage. Disclosure: their accents were far more accurate than ours.

Afterwards, we were allowed up onto the stage to poke through the incredibly detailed props and see how the lights worked. We spoke with the costume designer, lighting manager, set designer, and the playwright/director himself. We talked about our ideas for our art pieces and got to hear what it took them to put on the play. It was really a unique experience to get hear from the four individuals who created the play and then see their responses to our art pieces at our exhibition opening. It’s a great way to connect art forms and think about art across different mediums.

At our exhibition opening, the entire production team, actors, and director were all present to see our work unveiled. They were blown away by our pieces and it was so great to see how excited the cast was to see new perspectives on a piece they’ve been working so closely with for such a long time.