The Spitfire Grill plot summary, character breakdowns, context and analysis, and performance video clips.
The Spitfire Grill The Spitfire Grill, the musical by James Valcq and Fred Alley, was produced in the Kirkham Arena Theatre at Brigham Young University-Idaho, Fall Semester, 2006. Synopsis Percy Talbott is a young woman, just released from prison looking for a fresh start. During her incarceration she clipped a picture of Gilead, Wisconsin from a travel magazine and has determined she will move there. When she arrives, she is met with suspicion from all she meets. The sheriff, Joe Sutter, convinces the owner of The Spitfire Grill, Hannah Ferguson to give her a job. Things don't go so well at first but finally the women settle into a tenuous truce. Hannah has a bad fall in which she breaks her leg and Percy is left to take care of the grill and it's patrons by herself. Hannah asks Percy to leave a wrapped loaf of bread by an old stump behind the diner. Percy is useless in the kitchen and is joined by Shelby, the wife of Caleb, Hannah's nephew. Together they make sense of the business and in the process become close friends. Caleb is unhappy with this situation. The three women, Hannah, Percy and Shelby become very close and Hannah tells them she has been trying unsuccessfully to sell the grill. Percy comes up with an idea to raffle off the grill with an essay contest. One hundred dollars to enter, best essay wins the grill. Caleb, a real estate agent who has had the grill listed for ten years is upset by this plan and feels he is losing control of everything around him. He decides to investigate Percy. Percy confides in Shelby why she was in prison. Her stepfather raped her and when she became pregnant, he beat her repeatedly until she miscarried the baby. Then he raped her again and when he fell asleep she slit his throat with a straight razor. It seems that almost everyone has forgiven Percy but she cannot forgive herself. The advertisement for the raffle is a huge success and letters from all over the country come pouring in. Everyone in town gets caught up in the excitement. Everyone except Caleb. New life comes to Gilead. All through this, Percy keeps leaving the loaf of bread at the stump and we meet Eli, Hannah's son who deserted from the army during the Viet Nam War. He is homeless and a vagrant. Living on the bread left by his mother. He leads Percy to the mountain top where she finally learns to forgive herself. Percy helps to reunite Hannah and Eli and everyone is reconciled. Hannah gives the grill to Percy and Shelby as there advertisement was the best essay about the place. Great script, wonderful production. Concept The director, Roger Merrill wanted us as a design team to explore the idea that this was a town in limbo, a stagnant, static place. He also wanted a unit set without scene changes. The challenge for this was the fact that the play begins in prison, goes to the exterior of Gilead to the interior of the grill, then behind the grill to the woodpile. There's a scene in several locations in the town and finally to the mountaintop. As Roger was talking about what he wanted to say with the show, I kept having images of octagons moving through my mind. I didn't understand at first why octagons, but I went with them. I sketched up several thumbnail groundplans that involved octagonal decks and showed them to Roger. I was unsatisfied with not knowing why octagons and began to intellectualize my choice. I determined that this was a play about halted progression, and that octagons were the international shape of the stop sign. The important thing about stop signs is that they are only temporary and progression can begin again, which is also a theme in this play. Thumbnail groundplans Thumbnail groundplan Execution Since this was a unit set, we knew we were going to change locations with lighting for many of the scenes. The Kirkham Arena Theatre was a found space theatre without a fly loft. I decided to add a cyclorama to the back of the set to facilitate lighting shifts. It also helped to create a kind of limbo in which to tell the story of the play. We didn't want the cyc to be lit all of the time, so I placed a poorman's scrim three feet in front of it. The poorman's scrim was created with brown tricot stretched tightly on a frame. I had already used tricot in this fashion before in my career and knew it would work. There was a serendipitous effect when Richard Clifford, the lighting designer focused a source four with a cloud gobo on the scrim and it ghosted through to the cyc which gave us a double image of the clouds. I used that effect a few years later on my lighting design of Oedipus. It was stunning. Percy and Shelby in front of the dark scrim Clouds ghosting on the scrim and cyc. Effy, Shelby, Joe and Caleb Nighttime on the cyc, Percy and Eli As I designed the set, I chose to use two octagons to symbolize the interior of the grill. Since the majority of the play took place in the two rooms of the diner, I added much more detail on those two platforms. The upper platform was the kitchen and had a refrigerator, a counter, a stove and a backsplash. The lower platform was the dining area and had a wainscot and a couple of tables and some chairs. Downstage left I designed a lower, smaller octagonal platform to be the entrance to the grill and downstage right I designed another octagonal platform that functioned as the back porch. Outside of the porch I dressed the set with a stump and an axe and a pile of wood. Upstage right I designed a half octagon platform that was much higher and was at the level of the top of the backsplash. This platform functioned as both the prison and the mountaintop. It gave the sense of coming full circle. Hannah on the upper octagonal platform, the kitchen Caleb on the lower octagonal platform, the dining room Percy, Joe, Shelby and Hannah on the dining room deck reading the raffle entries Percy and Joe on the small exterior platform DSL Shelby and Percy on the back porch Percy and Hannah with the loaf of bread on the stump behind the grill Three non-descript locations somewhere in Gilead The half octagon as the prison, with Percy The half octagon as the mountaintop, with Eli and Percy Octagons, with Percy and Joe I enjoyed working on this show very much. I felt that the scene, lighting and costume designs all came together to fulfill the director's vision of The Spitfire Grill. This is a great script and it is almost impossible to exit the theatre without having an emotional experience with the material. I'm glad I had the opportunity to work on it. Production Details Directed by Roger Merrill Scene Design by Gary Benson Lighting Design by Richard Clifford Costume Design by Susan Whitfield Technical Director: Ray Versluys Costume Shop Director: Patty Randall
A CRITIC REMINISCES I think Oscar Wilde was on to something. The bit about the portrait in the attic, I mean. Barbara Walker McBain was a leading lady when I arrived in the Valley in 1977. She's a leading lady today. When I look at photos, I'll be darned if I can see much of
To learn more about NU's Drama Department and our spring production please visit: The Spitfire Grill.
of British sports cars & adolescent foolishneess...
Season 77 Memberships on sale ACADEMY: Summer Registration Main Stage: CATS HELLO AND WELCOME TO SPOKANE CIVIC THEATRE Founded in 1947, Spokane Civic Theatre is an award-winning nonprofit community theatre. The organization, which initially operated out of a
Little Shop of Horrors at Williamsburg Players Williamsburg Players presents, Little Shop of Horrors. The meek floral assistant Seymour Krelborn stumbles across a new breed of plant he na…
American Blues Theater Presents THE SPITFIRE GRILL Review – Sentimental, Sweet, RECOMMENDED Best Play Pick musical, Thru August 17, 2019 Karl Hamilton, Catherine Smitko With her strong voice with that familiar country music singer twang, actress Jacquelyne Jones as Percy Talbot brings us into this story with song. She is in a jail cell dreaming […]
The production of “The Spitfire Grill” being produced by the Corvallis School District Theater program starts with a lone figure on a dark stage – a single spotlight reveals the
CountryLiving.com's coast-to-coast guide to the top spots for finding vintage treasures this spring and summer.
Join MVS and composer James Valcq (The Spitfire Grilll) in a masterclass to find the emotional truth in Golden Age theater songs.
(Click here for a random post from somewhere else in this blog.)
Circumstances and exhaustion and a very worn-out baby meant that we did not stop by any of the several places still on our Athens to-do list as we made our way downtown to see a free show by one of…
Research suggests that having nurseries in prisons leads to lower recidivism rates among incarcerated mothers and better outcomes for their children—but they’re still far too rare.
Meagan Dakota Grunwald's attorney says she was forced by Jose Angel Garcia-Jauregui, 27, to drive her truck at high speeds after he fatally shot Utah County Sheriff's Sergeant Cory Wride as he sat in his patrol car.
A RIFF on what country is really about.
Source: USPS…
Research suggests that having nurseries in prisons leads to lower recidivism rates among incarcerated mothers and better outcomes for their children—but they’re still far too rare.
Your Ultimate Guide To Prince Edward County - Personal, Round-Ups, Uncategorized
OKLAHOMA CITY – The Oklahoma Department of Corrections says they are making efforts to improve security at a facility that has had four inmates walk away from it since January. By Thursday, ODOC moved all 1,122 male inmates at the Jess Dunn Correctional Center to bright orange uniforms instead of gray. The orange “is immediately […]
Here are several different views of The Center Players show Arsenic and Old Lace set. I designed and built the set by myself. In my last b...
Berlin is full of ethnic food choices, but what happens when you are craving German food? While in Berlin, I learned how to cook my own german classics - sauerbraten and spatzle - through a local cooking school.