During the week of August 14 through 17, the Lexington Center for the Arts will host the First Annual Fusion Festival. The festival is the brainchild of actor, playwright and former mountaintop resident Nate Chura, along with Curt Dempster, the founder and Artistic Director of the Ensemble Studio Theater (EST), a highly acclaimed theater group in New York City. Jamie Richards, director of the Lexington Center for the Arts (the mountaintop home of EST) is a producer of the festival. Together, the three have spent the past year putting together this festival, which promises to be especially exciting and a rare opportunity for theater groups from both on and off the mountaintop to come together to produce world-class theater programming. “We eventually would like this to be a year-round festival,” Nate said, “basically to encourage local writers to get out there and start writing. We also think it’s really important to help bring first-rate theater programming to the Catskill Mountains.”



The Lexington Center for the Arts presents a wide variety of cultural programs, from dance, music and theater performances to an art gallery. Each year, the Ensemble Studio Theater holds their summer conference there, with concert readings of new plays every Saturday night that are open to the public and free. This year’s conference will take place from July 4 through August 10.



The Fusion Festival will kick off with a week-long residency program of the participating theater groups, which include Ensemble Studio Theater, the Greene Room Players, Kids in the Woods, Horton By the Stream, the Catskill Dance Theater and the Medicine Show. The groups will be rehearsing new plays throughout the week, which will culminate in a series of performances on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. A kick-off fundraiser will be held on Thursday night, to raise money to help renovate the mansion currently owned by the Lexington Center for the Arts, located on the banks of the Schoharie Creek in Lexington. The mansion currently houses an art gallery that is only open on certain weekends throughout the summer, featuring exhibitions of painting, sculpture and photography. The hope is to renovate the building so that the gallery can be open year-round. Tickets for the fundraiser are $25 apiece and can be purchased by contacting the Lexington Center for the Arts at 518 989 6043 or the Ensemble Studio Theater at 212 247 4982.



What makes this festival so special is that it will be the professional premier of new works by local artists and by New York City artists who have connections to the mountaintop. Nate himself will be making his directorial debut, and The Medicine Show is preparing an opera about an unlikely operatic subject, that is, beekeepers. In addition, two new plays by acclaimed writer Horton Foote will be performed. Horton Foote is one of America’s leading dramatists. His early career in writing for the stage led him into writing television drama, writing plays for Playhouse 90, Philco Playhouse and U.S. Steel Hour. The next step in his career led to Hollywood where he wrote an adaptation of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, that provided an acting opportunity for Robert Duvall and an Academy Award for Mr. Foote. Twenty years later, he wrote the screenplay Tender Mercies especially for Duvall, which brought Academy Awards to both Duvall and Foote. In 1985, Mr. Foote’s play A Trip to Bountiful (nominated for an Academy Award and has been produced for stage and television) won an Academy Award for Geraldine Page. Foote received the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Young Man from Atlanta, the story of an older couple attempting to cope with a son’s death and the possibility of his homosexuality. Horton By the Stream, an Elka Park-based theater company, is dedicated to performing the works of Mr. Foote, and will be an active participant in the Fusion Festival.



In total, there will be seven or eight new productions at the Fusion Festival, with several performances each day. This will be a rare opportunity to see new plays performed for the first time on the mountaintop, and should not be missed. What’s better is that all performances are free and open to the public. For more information about the Fusion Festival, call the Lexington Center for the Arts at 518 989 6043 or the Ensemble Studio Theater at 212 247 4982. You can also log onto EST’s Web site at www.ensemblestudiotheatre.org.