Music festival set to present 'The Breeze Bends the Grass'

Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., the Greencastle Summer Music Festival presents songs and readings from "The Breeze Bends the Grass," a musical theater event focusing on important woman artists from the turn of the 20th century: painter Marie Goth; metal artist Janet Payne Bowles; landscaper Selma Steele; and ceramicists The Overbeck Sisters.

No tickets are required for the performance in Gobin Memorial United Methodist Church. The Festival is funded by donations at performances, an endowment at the Putnam County Community Foundation and gifts from individual and business sponsors, including the Inn at DePauw.

Funded by the Indiana Arts Commission's Individual Artist Grant and sponsored by Women's Way, "The Breeze Bends the Grass" was written by award-winning writers Arbutus Cunningham and Krista Detor. The cast includes the writers along with stellar performers Amanda Biggs, Lara Lynn Weaver and Kate Braun.

The performances are powerful, the subject matter intriguing -- both historically and emotionally. The piece aims to bring to light the lives and struggles of women artists amidst the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th century -- and in the end, the glimpse into a time long-past may very well alter viewers' opinion of the time in which they live: Maybe you take note of the light in the last moments of dusk...maybe you name the hue of a rooftop...maybe, unexpectedly, you see it -- the way the breeze bends the grass.

"The performances in 'The Breeze Bends the Grass' are hauntingly powerful, and the women they portray will speak to the soul of every person who has ever been determined to live who they really are," WNC Magazine said in a review.

The Festival concludes next week with a concert by classical and improvising pianist John Kamfonas and cellist Eric Edberg, festival founder and artistic director.