 My name is Kim Venn, I'm the founding artistic director of Lost Nation Theatre and we are about to open a production of The Turn of the Screw, it's an adaptation of the Henry James novel written by Jeffrey Hatcher. I'm also directing the production. I'm here with the two actors who are performing here. Hi, my name is Laura Michelle Earl and I'm playing the role of the governess. And I am Christopher Shear and I am playing the role of everyone who was not the governess. That includes a narrator, the gentleman who hires the governess, the little English school boy in the governess's care and the housekeeper who collaborates with the governess. I've done a lot of shows at Lost Nation where where I play multiple characters. This has been a very interesting project for me because it's all of the same tools that we use in those kinds of comedies but it's a very thrilling and suspenseful, dramatic and moody, very just viscerally chilling gothic horror. So to use those tools of comedy but to apply them to a different genre has been a very interesting challenge for me. I think part of the challenge of playing multiple characters is I have to keep them distinct and that to a certain degree involves broad strokes and caricaturalization but at the same time you know if I'm not having an authentic experience the audience isn't either. What's really neat about the fact that one person is playing all these characters it kind of connects them in a way and there's this ambiguity and they kind of start to bleed together in a way that's a little unnerving. One moment Chris is the master who hired me and then he's the little boy and then he's the housekeeper and just trying to like keep yeah it just is very powerful going through the show and having them start to blend together. Well the story is being told in 1872 talking about a time period when people actually wrote really complex sentences and writers got paid by the word so it's an incredible challenge to adapt something like that for a modern audience I think. There are a lot of characters in the source material there's a lot of characters in the novel there's you know like the sentences it's very complex so how do you boil all that down in a way that can be performed on stage and play has a really strong structure it's told over seven days and during that time she unravels a lot of really interesting information about what's been happening at this country's state in England because essentially essentially it's the governess is stored and she is telling it via the diary and then it's also being told by this other person who read the diary and telling who's telling something somebody else about having read it and about you know knowing this person so there are layers and there are we talk about you know the fact that Laura plays the one character but in fact she within that character she has different voices because it's really storytelling and sometimes she's talking to the audience more like a narrator than a character so it's really it is it's a it's a wonderful exploration of the art of storytelling. This show performs at Laugh Station Theatre we're at City Hall in Montpelier and have been this is the start of our fourth decade there but it's the beginning of our season it's our first show of our season and it opens on April 25 and runs for three against Thursday through Sunday and as you can see we've got a great cast and it's going to be a lot of fun. Come see Turn of the Screw at Laugh Station Theatre.