Permanent Visitor - a festival celebrating Dawn Powell in New York, January through March 2002 (Photo: Patricia A. Chilsen as Dawn Powell) Our 2001 - 2002 season included our most ambitious project to date, Permanent Visitor - a festival celebrating Dawn Powell in New York a two month festival (January through March) produced in conjunction with two other theater companies, New Georges and 78th Street Theatre Lab. Sightlines Theater Company acted as the Executive Producers of the overall festival, which focused on the writer Dawn Powell (1896-1965). Powell came to New York in 1918 and lived here for 47 years, a "permanent visitor" distilling the city into poems, stories, articles, plays, and dizzying and inventive novels. Gore Vidal once described her as "our best comic novelist," deserving to be as widely read as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. With the recent publication of Powell's diaries (named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and a new biography by Tim Page, there is a resurgence of interest in her work. An important component of the theater festival was for Sightlines to organize free events, panel discussions and readings around New York City in collaboration with The Museum of the City of New York, Barnes and Noble, The Atlantic Theater and The Algonquin Hotel's 'Spoken Word Series'. In terms of the festival's theater productions, Sightlines presented three productions, out of a total of six theater productions. Those productions by Sightlines included: Jig Saw one of Powell's plays written in 1934, as well as two commissioned plays, the premiere of an original adaptation of three of Powell's short stories by playwright Kira Obolensky (Lobster Alice), and a new play about Dawn Powell by Laura Strausfeld. All productions were presented over a two month period out of one hub - the 78th Street Theatre Lab, which has two black-box theaters on the Upper West Side at 78th and Broadway. More about Permanent Visitor
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