Play Reading: Quite Contrary (a Secret Garden) By Aly Kantor

Experience a world premiere staged reading of a new, transhistorical reimagining of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, written by Long Island playwright Aly Kantor. The piece will be presented in the red ballroom of Westbury House with full costumes and immersive audio by an ensemble of six local performers (and one bird). Stay afterward for a reception and chat with the playwright, director, and cast. 

Synopsis: Long Island, 1952. Ornery, Shakespeare-loving Mary Lennox is twenty-something and, somehow, an old maid. When her reluctance to marry is diagnosed as a nervous condition, her great-aunt ships her off to Misselthwaite, a shuttered Long Island tuberculosis sanatorium, newly reopened by the physician who treated her mother there twenty years ago. She’s facing ninety days of rest, but the overgrown grounds and empty facility hold secrets, and Mary must decide if she’d rather stick to her measured rest cure or pursue the truth against the doctor’s orders and reclaim the future she deserves. 

Quite Contrary is a nostalgic, unexpectedly funny ensemble piece, and a love letter to Long Islander Frances Hodgson Burnett. 

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by The Huntington Arts Council. 

The evening will conclude with a panel discussion and light refreshments.

FEE: $10 (No member discount is available)