“On Agate Hill,” the one-woman play adapted from the Lee Smith novel, will be presented by Chapel Hill’s Deep Dish Theater, June 5-15.
Barbara Bates Smith, noted for her adaptation and off-Broadway performance of “Ivy Rowe” from Lee Smith’s “Fair and Tender Ladies,” stars in “On Agate Hill.” Musical accompaniment is by Jeff Sebens.
The performance schedule is Thursday, June 5 at 7:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, June 6-7, 8 p.m.; Sunday, June 8, 2 p.m.; Saturday, June 14, 8 p.m. and Sunday, June 15, 2 p.m. All performances are at the Deep Dish Theater in Chapel Hill’s University Mall, located on Estes Drive and U.S. 15-501. Tickets for all performances are $16, $14 for seniors and $12 for students.
Lee Smith will attend the performance on June 5 and chat with the audience after the show. She will also autograph copies of her books in the Deep Dish lobby.
The novel’s heroine, Molly Petree, orphaned by the Civil War, is “a spitfire and a burden” who risks everything to hold on to her own nature and to true love.
Other literary adaptations in Barbara Smith’s touring repertoire are “B. Smith Does Lee Smith,” a Lee Smith sampler; “Ellen Foster” from the Kaye Gibbons novel; and a Fred Chappell sampler.
Prize-winning North Carolina novelist Lee Smith has written 12 novels, including the New York Times bestseller “The Last Girls,” “Fair and Tender Ladies” and “Oral History”; and three collections of short stories. Literary awards have included the Lila Wallace/ Readers’ Digest Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
For tickets or more information call Deep Dish Theater at 919-968-1515 or visit the Deep Dish Web site at www.deepdishtheater.org.
Literary Hall of Fame
SOUTHERN PINES n Three writers ó poet James Applewhite, historian William S. Powell and novelist Lee Smith ó will be added to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame this fall.
The induction ceremony will be Sunday, Oct. 19, at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines.
“The three inductees represent North Carolina’s best literary traditions and achievements in fiction, poetry and nonfiction,” said N.C. State University professor emeritus Jim Clark, who chaired the selection committee.
Applewhite was born in Stantonsburg in 1935. He received the 1995 North Carolina Award in Literature as well as the 1992 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award in Poetry. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and professor of English at Duke University. His books of poetry include “Quartet for Three Voices,” “Daytime and Starlight” and “A Diary of Altered Light.”
Powell, professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author or editor of dozens of books, including the “Encyclopedia of North Carolina” and “The North Carolina Gazetteer.” He received the North Carolina Award for Literature in 2000.
Smith was born in Grundy, Va., in 1944, and moved to North Carolina in 1974. She is the author of 11 novels. A retired professor of English at N.C. State University, Smith received an Academy Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999.
The Hall of Fame was founded in 1996, under the leadership of poet laureate Sam Ragan, and is a program of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. The 2008 induction will be the first in which the Network and the Weymouth Center collaborate with the North Carolina Center for the Book, the North Carolina Humanities Council, and the North Carolina Collection of the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill to produce the induction ceremony and to promote the NCLHOF and North Carolina’s literary heritage.
“These organizations share many of the same goals as the Network and the Literary Hall of Fame,” said Network executive director Ed Southern. “They’re very excited to help honor this year’s inductees and to make sure more North Carolinians know about this state’s contributions to literature.”
“As living authors, these inductees can join forces in free public programming that promotes reading and writing statewide,” Clark said.