Mix a Hitchcock masterpiece with a juicy spy novel, add a dash of Monty Python and you have...(mystery chords!) Alfred Hitchcock’s THE 39 STEPS, Broadway's most intriguing, most thrilling, most riotous, most UNMISSABLE comedy smash! The mind-blowing cast of 4 plays over 150 characters in this fast-paced tale of an ordinary man on an extraordinarily entertaining adventure. WINNER! 2 TONY AWARDS® !  HILARIOUS FUN FOR THEATRE-LOVERS OF ALL AGES!

Thursday, November 5 at 8:00pm

Friday, November 6 at 8:00pm

Saturday, November 7 at 2:00 & 8:00pm

Opening Reception to be held October 18 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.

Exhibit runs from October 18 through November 13.

 The Middletown's Common Ground International Film Festival (September 24th-November 5th) concludes with a screening of "Everything is Illuminated"

 Synopsis:

"A young American Jewish man begins an exhausting quest -- aided by a naïve Ukranian translator -- to find the righteous gentile woman who saved his grandfather when his small Ukranian village (along with most of the populace) was obliterated during the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941. Stars Elijah Wood, Eugene Hutz and Boris Leskin. Liev Schreiber directs. Based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer."

 Each screening begins promptly at 7:00 p.m. and is followed by a scholarly discussion of the film’s cultural and societal themes. The venues are handicapped accessible and offer plenty of free parking. All events are free and refreshments reflecting each film’s heritage will be served.

Love mysteries? Like free prizes? Play The Maltese Falcon library mystery game. Follow a series of clues throughout the Shelton Libraries. Help solve the mystery of who stole Peaches, the library snake’s cousin Malta. When you think that you have solved the mystery, write down who you think is the culprit on a form found at either the Plumb or Huntington Branch Libraries. Successful sleuths will be entered in a drawing for 2 $50 gift certificates to Staples. The Big Read is funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

EVENT DURING LIBRARY HOURS

10:00am – 4:30pm Daily; Sunday, 12:00pm-4:30pm

10:00am – 4:30pm Daily; Sunday, 12:00pm-4:30pm

10:00am – 4:30pm Daily; Sunday, 12:00pm-4:30pm

10:00am – 4:30pm Daily; Sunday, 12:00pm-4:30pm

City Lights Gallery hours

Showtimes are at 8:00pm AND Midnight

It’s Alive! Following last fall’s smash hit production, The Rocky Horror
Show returns to the Playhouse. Experience this new Bridgeport tradition
for the first time, or come “do the Time Warp Again!” Recommended for
Mature Audiences.  Tickets and showtimes at www.playhouseonthegreen.org

10:00am-5:00pm

The Discovery Museum’s Big Read Mystery Lab will bring out your inner
detective, whether you’re a puzzle ponderer by nature or not. Visitors can
gather clues and examine evidence to solve totally fictional, historically
hokey “Crimes of Science”. Included with general admission.

6:00pm-7:00pm

From George Washington to Benjamin Franklin, discover how our founding
fathers altered the course of history by employing skillful intelligence
tactics to outmaneuver the British army.
 

The works in this exhibition reflect the visions of Swedish women who broke from their traditional roles of women, mothers and homemakers to explore their creativity as textile designers, weavers, painters, sculptors and glass artists. Their art resonates with dream-like images of free-flying birds evoking flight and escape from domestic confinement, year-round idyllic visions of midsummer blossoms, and spare Nordic landscapes filled with greenery, water, space, and light.  

Women's Work, Women's Dreams celebrates a remarkable legacy from a country whose art and artists are little known to American viewers.  The Benton Museum is grateful to Samuel and Ann Charters for sharing their extraordinary collection of Swedish Art and Art Glass and for curating this exhibit.

Gallery Hours: 

Thursday & Friday: 10 am - 4:30 pm

Saturday & Sunday: 1 - 4:30 pm

The Benton will be closed:

November 23 - December 2

Three decades of wars have deeply marked the entire culture of Afghanistan, yet artistic expression, particularly through carpets, has been maintained in spite of hardships including displacement to refugee camps.  

In traditional Afghan carpet-weaving, patterns tended to be geometric or floral, reflecting the Islamic rejection of anthropomorphic depictions.  However, by the mid-1980s, in response to the 1979 Soviet Invasion, Afghani weavers, principally women, were creating carpets that showed Russian tanks, helicopters and guns.  The subtle geometric borders often contained rows of bullets and grenades.  Most recently, these "war carpets" have included references to the American conflict and even to 9/11.  Although many of the carpets have Arabic or Persian woven into their designs, the Afghani who created them found a market for these rugs in the West.  In part this may be presumed anti-war sentiments but also, while the rugs are generally traditional in design and relatively inexpensive, they are nonetheless a contemporary artistic expression of a century old craft.  

In this exhibition of over fifty contemporary Afghan carpets showing both war and traditional designs, the rugs offer a commentary on modern Afghan history and, in their maintenance of a vibrant tradition, a measure of hope for the future.

Gallery Hours:

Thursday & Friday: 10 am-4:30 pm

Saturday & Sunday: 1-4:30 pm

The Benton will be closed:

November 23-December 2

Solve infectious disease mysteries by examining interactive patients, analyzing lab tests and identifying culprit microbes. Running Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday noon to 5 p.m. through Jan. 31.

Hartford Public Library Exhibit

The American Mural Project (AMP) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of the largest indoor collaborative artwork in the world – a mural 120 feet long, 5 stories high, and up to 10 feet deep. Over 10,000 people have worked on it since artist Ellen Griesedieck conceived of it ten years ago. This exhibition at Hartford Public Library will feature some of the finished pieces of the mural, as well as a scale model and plans for elements in progress. Visitors will also have the chance to work on an eight-foot paper-pulp sculpture, one of many AMP is now sending across the country to be painted before their eventual installation in the mural. Throughout the month of the exhibit, AMP will also be coordinating projects with kids from local schools, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Hartford Stage, and other arts organizations around the city.

The Artist’s Vision

In the American Mural Project, Ellen Griesedieck celebrates the engineers and ironworkers, heart surgeons and athletes, cattle workers and craftsmen, and many others who have defined our nation through their work. Ellen paints on a large scale but with an intimate relationship to each of her subjects.

To make the mural as large in spirit as it is in size, Ellen asked people in all 50 states to contribute. Thousands of artists, scientists, teachers and children from coast to coast have responded. Children have worked together with remarkable people, including the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, an inner-city dance troupe, scientists of the 2003 Mars Explorer Rover Mission, survivors of a Japanese-American internment camp, and an intergenerational foster-home community.

About one quarter of the mural is finished. Collaborative projects are in progress around the country, and work on the mural’s new home, in the Whiting Mills complex in Winsted, CT, is about to begin. With soaring ceilings, open floor plans, and long rows of windows, this 19^th century complex of mills and warehouses is an ideal setting for a monumental mural about working Americans. The future includes a visitor’s center with spaces for a theater, studios, and classrooms, as well as a woodland park for outdoor summer concerts and special events.

“What I Want to Say,” a program of premieres and a retrospective repertory mix, will be presented by the Judy Dworin Performance Project as the culmination of the company’s 20th anniversary season on November 5, 6, and 7 at the Charter Oak Cultural Center.

Dworin’s dance-theater works are known for social commentary and compelling, humanistic warmth. Cutting across boundaries of gender, geography, and governmental decree, she testifies for those whose voices have been stilled or muted by history and failures of civil rights and criminal justice. Whether questioning or condemning authority, her dance-theater works convey inspiring stories of perseverance, transcendence, and hope through movement and gesture, poetry and song.

The program’s “retro-mix” includes repertory that steps off the pages of history: the chant-dance “Are You Good Goody Good?” from “The Witching Hour,” an exploration of 17th-century Puritan hysteria in Wethersfield; and “Radium Girls” from “Hotlicks,” about turn-of-the-last-century clock face painters encouraged to restore their brush points by licking them and who playfully painted their mouths for glow-in-the-dark effect. Other repertory selections delve into recent history, such as the effects of radioactive rains in Chernobyl and the bold demands and demonstrations undertaken by mothers of “the disappeared” in Chile and Argentina.

New and recent works draw upon Dworin’s ongoing teaching residency and artistic collaboration with incarcerated women at York Correctional Institution in Niantic, with those who have served their sentences, and their young and adult children.

Hayrides are available every WEEKEND in November as well as SCHOOL holidays. Rides begin at the W.O.L.F. Cabin and are $2.00 each.

The American Mural Project will create the single largest piece of indoor collaborative artwork in the country.  A mixed-media painting and relief sculpture, it will ultimately be housed in the Whiting Mills Complex in Winsted, CT and measure 120 feet long, 5 stories high, and up to 10 feet deep. This exhibition features some of the huge finished pieces of the mural, a scale model, drawings and plans for elements in progress, and an eight-foot sculptural element.

Downtown Library

October 26-November 29, 2009

Artist Reception Friday, November 13, 5:30-7:00 p.m.

Exhibition tour of Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill at 11am

An original One-Act play created by AI Prince Tech & Glastonbury High School students. Admission is free!

For more information, call (860) 761-4530.

HartBeat Ensemble’s Youth Play Institute (YPI) is an after-school program that brings urban and suburban youth together for an intensive month-long play creation process with working theater professionals. By teaching youth to communicate with each other through theater, the program breaks down racial and economic stereotypes and exposes participants to people they have thus far been sheltered from.

This year's title is: 

The Hard Hitting Fairy Tale: When Character Confusion Collides

 The Crucible - This classic Arthur Miller play uses some of the events of the Salem Witch Trials to examine social themes that still resonate today.