- This event has passed.
Across a Barrier of Fear: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt
July 27 @ 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Trinity Arts Commission presents “Across a Barrier of Fear: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt.”
In this one-woman show by playwright and Trinity parishioner Sharon Whitney, distinguished character actress Jane Van Boskirk brings Eleanor Roosevelt to life. The performance will include a talkback with the show’s star, local historians, and public policy scholars.
The play traces Eleanor’s growing awareness of the world as she sees beyond the aristocratic society into which she was born, doing charity work that opened her eyes to sweatshops and child labor and launched her into a lifetime of public service. Finally, we watch as she overcomes the death of her husband and partner to head the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission and lead the crafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The performance runs 65 minutes without intermission and is free to the public.
About the actress: In her lifetime on the stage, Jane Van Boskirk has performed searing dramas and musical comedies, queens and strumpets, and even a marmot. She is best known to Pacific Northwest audiences for her touring one-woman shows rooted in history and exploring a range of fascinating personalities. She has introduced audiences to firebrand organizer Mother Jones, missionary Mother Cabrini, pioneering woman doctor Bethenia Owens Adair, suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway, and Florence Reece, a miner’s wife who penned “Which Side Are You On?”
About the playwright: Sharon Whitney has written more than a dozen prize-winning plays and four published books. In respect to this project, she is also the author of a 1986 biography of Eleanor Roosevelt for Young Adults, published by Franklin Watts, New York, and an ensemble play about Eleanor at age 15 at her boarding school in England, “Totty – Young Eleanor Roosevelt,” published by Anchorage Press, New Orleans.
Among other honors, Sharon received the Oregon Institute for Literary Arts Drama Fellowship, the Oregon Arts Commission Artist Fellowship, the Oregon Book Award for Best Play, First Prize for Playwriting from the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference, and has had plays produced in Ireland, South Africa, and London, as well as in the U.S. In June 2000, she was chosen by a competition to develop one of her plays, “Five Minute Wars,” with Portland Center Stage and New York Theatre Workshop.
