A former Ashfield resident who has been involved in theater since she was a young child will play The Bastard character in William Shakespeare’s “King John” at the Calderwood Pavilion at Boston Center for the Arts beginning the end of this month and running through Feb. 16, and she’s thrilled about it.
Annalise Cain, a 24-year-old actor, playwright and producer who graduated from South Hadley-based Pioneer Valley Performing Arts (PVPA) charter public school says she has done a lot of work in theater. This May, she will be returning to Franklin County from Cambridge, where she lives now, to present one of her short plays during Silverthorne Theater Co.’s Short and Sweet Festival.
“I spent two hours a day in the car to get back and forth to PVPA, but it was all worth it because I got a wonderful education,” Cain said. “It has a fabulous program. The staff nurtured me as a playwright, knew exactly what I needed.”
When she was younger, Cain says she needed space to do her own thing. The school gave it to her.
“I got such a robust education,” she said. Notably, her first play, which she wrote while she was at PVPA, received accolades. Through the school, Cain co-founded the Clementine Collective in 2014, a theater collective dedicated to producing new, neglected works and to connecting young artists. According to the organization’s website, the organization “started as the brainchild of a couple of alums from the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts High School.” Clementine Collective has produced a number of Cain’s original plays including Madeleine George’s “The Zero Hour,” which was performed in Greenfield in 2015.
“King John” will be the first play Cain will perform outside of school that she didn’t also produce. It is a history play about the reign of King John of England, who was son of Henry II and father of Henry III. It is believed it was written in the mid-1590s but was not published until 1623.
“I’d never heard of it or read it before,” she said. “It actually hasn’t been done as often as other Shakespeare plays.”
Her character, The Bastard, is thrown into a world of absurdly rich people with little sense of what power does to everyday people. Cain, who holds an undergraduate degree in theater from Boston University, says she’s looking forward to taking on the persona in front of an audience.
“I’ve always been attracted to language onstage,” Cain said. “It’s so precise, so powerful. When you’ve got good language, you participate in a battle of wits.”
Cain says she has always put everything into her performances — what she knows, what she feels — and she’s been lucky enough to be surrounded by similar types of people. She loves the storytelling aspect of theater, which is, in many cases, old, natural, primal.
These days, Caine, who lives in Cambridge, says she doesn’t get back to Western Massachusetts very often, as most of her family does not live in the area any longer. But while her family doesn’t live here anymore, that doesn’t mean Franklin County isn’t still an artistic base.
“Silverthorne will be doing one of my short plays in May,” Cain said. “That’s exciting.”
As a playwright, Cain says she writes a lot about desires that people have but don’t want. She believes in stretching audiences, that theater is a communal, empathetic exercise and in being “unapologetically political.”
One past play, for example, titled “What Screams I Hear Are Mine,” is about an autistic girl. Inspiration for the play came from a night she spent on a houseboat. At one point, she heard screams coming from somewhere on the river and realized she had heard a rape happening.
“It really affected me,” she said. “It was my first experience of sexual assault in real-time.”
“That same summer, I spent a couple of weeks in Brown’s Playwright Program,” she said. “It drew me in with crazy prompts. The play was sitting in the back of my head. I was curious about how a rapist would justify such an act. I wrote from a rhetorical place first and then I expanded on it.”
In 2018, “What Screams I Hear Are Mine” was a semifinalist for the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Coming up in the fall, a monologue from the play will be published in “100 Monologues from New Plays — Men.”
Another piece, “The Rebound,” a one-act play she wrote that was included in the Strident Reading Series, was like a “Friends” episode about double dating. That one, too, had a little of the Me Too movement in it and explored neglected male victims who aren’t vocal about it. “They end up being a punchline, but it’s real,” she said. In October, “The Rebound” will be part of the Emerging Artists Theatre’s New Work Series.
In addition to writing about desires, Cain says she’s always looking for ways to spotlight climate change as well. She was raised to be strong and to care about social justice, to see the world in an empathetic and true way, she says. This carries over into her writing.
“I’m always looking at ways to unearth our humanity,” she said. “I’m a very intellectual person who cares about making the world a better place.”
Other recent credits include Mary in “The Grace of Mary Traverse (Collective Hysteria), Friar Laurence in “Romeo and Juliet” (Boston University School of Theatre) and Gladys in “The Skin of Our Teeth” (Silverthorne Theater Co.). She received the 2017 National Partners of the American Theatre Playwriting Award and her work has been developed with the Tribe Theatre Co., Strident Theatre, Playhouse on Park, Queens Threatre and Brimmer Theatre.
Her play “Hurry Up and Wait” will be performed in Silverthorne Theater Co.’s Short and Sweet Festival of New (tiny) Plays. The low-tech production will include plays that are no more than 20 minutes long, have no more than four actors and are simple in production.
“King John,” directed by Kimberly Gaughan, will be presented on Praxis Stage in Deanne Hall in the Calderwood Pavillion, 527 Tremont St. in Boston from Jan. 30 through Feb. 16. Visit: www.praxisstage.com.
“The Rebound,” directed by Madison Findling, will be presented at Dixon Place, Mainstage, 161A Chrystie St., New York, on March 26.
For more information about Cain, visit: www.annalisecain.com. For more information about the Short and Sweet Festival, visit: www.silverthornetheater.org.
Reach Anita Fritz at 413-772-9591, ext. 269, or afritz@recorder.com.