Crook Farm to provide site for spring production

University of Pittsburgh at Bradford students will perform “Trifles,” an early feminist one-act play first performed in 1916 and set in an isolated farmhouse, April 3-6.

Appropriately, the play will be performed at the Bradford Landmark Society’s Crook Farm homestead at 7:30 p.m. April 3-5 and at 2 p.m. April 6. Tickets are $6 for the public and $2 for all students. They must be purchased in advance through the Bromeley Family Theater Box office at upb.pitt.edu/TheArts or by calling 814-362-5113.

“Trifles” is a spare, tightly wound mystery written by Susan Glaspell. It was inspired by a murder case in 1900 that Glaspell covered as a reporter at the Des Moines Daily News.

The Pitt-Bradford production, directed by Dr. Kevin Ewert, professor of theater, will be performed in the bank building at Crook Farm with audience members surrounding the kitchen and parlor “stage.” While the male investigators wander upstairs and downstairs and in and out of the building in search of evidence, the two women left behind in the kitchen find plenty.

“This play is highly anthologized and has a long history on the American stage” Ewert said.  “But taking it to the Crook Farm site I think will really focus an audience’s attention and give the cast an appropriate and evocative space to haunt.”  Neither the murder victim nor the prime suspect appear in the play.  Instead, Ewert says, “Glaspell conjures a completely different story as the women wrestle with the truth of what becomes all too visible to them.”

The student cast is made up of Mara Martinec, an English education 7-12 major from Oil City as Mrs. Hale; Megan Lichner, a forensic science major from Bradford as Mrs. Peters; Randy Mong, an English major from Russell as Mr. Henderson; Sean Luce, a writing major from Bradford as Sherriff Peters; and Travis Dannu, a broadcast communications major from Sarver, as Mr. Hale.

This is not the first time the theater program has taken a production off-campus. In 2019, Ewert staged Maurice Maeterlinck’s “The Intruder” in the living room of 120 School Street, which serves as home to Pitt-Bradford’s president. In 2012 the original work “An Evening of Stories by Edgar Allan Poe” was staged throughout all six floors of Marilyn Horne Hall in downtown Bradford.

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