OLLI Players Present Two Original Works

OLLI at BCC Performing Arts Initiative Presents:

OLLI Players, a Reader's Theatre Company

Six Grandfathers &
Rabbi Franklin's Model T

by Jesse Waldinger

Tuesday, October 8, 2024 at 7:00 p.m.

Free & open to all

In-person at Zion Lutheran Church, 74 First Street, Pittsfield, MA.

Two Staged Readings

Rabbi Franklin’s Model T
Dearborn, Michigan, 1920:  Henry Ford's neighbor and friend, a Rabbi to whom the automobile magnate has annually presented a new car as a gift, protests the anti-Semitic diatribes that appear in the company paper.  Ford is unmoved.

Six Grandfathers (Oglala Lakota name for Mount Rushmore)
South Dakota, 1927.  Gutzon Borglum, noted sculptor of Mount Rushmore, is confronted by a native woman who credibly accuses him of cavorting with the Ku Klux Klan and trampling Indian treaty rights. 

Jesse Waldinger (Playwright)

Author of the full-length dramas The Knights of Mary Phagan and The Loyalist, along with over twenty short historical plays, Waldinger's works have been seen at various local venues, as well as on Long Island, in California, and in New Hampshire.  He was the co-director of Plays in Progress, a collaborative of more than thirty professional playwrights, actors, directors and designers.  

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This event is supported through the generous philanthropy of Nancy and Michael Vale, whose bequest established the Michael and Nancy Vale Performing Arts Fund at OLLI at Berkshire Community College. This endowed fund supports theater-based OLLI programming.