Everyman Repertory Theatre will present the world premiere of “Hold Onto Your Hat!” The one-woman show, written and performed by Andrea Itkin of Camden, will open its statewide tour Saturday, Sept. 1, at 7:30 p.m. at the Marsh River Theatre, 24 Monroe Highway/Route 139.
The show is part memoir, part social commentary, written from the perspective of youth through old age — delivered all in rhyme and a bit of song with a lot of humor. “Andrea kept bringing in these poems to our Actors’ Studio last year and reading them, and we were all just blown away by how good they were; how funny, how sad, how, sometimes, angry,” said Everyman Rep’s artistic director Paul Hodgson. “We knew we had to help her get it on stage and in front of people.”
Itkin said that although she had written some plays and monologues, short stories and poems over the years, she had never attempted rhymes or songs before starting work on this show.
“It was initially inspired by Patti Smith’s memoir, ‘Just Kids,’ which got me thinking about that time of my life and experimenting with expressing experience in a new way,” she said.
“Hold Onto Your Hat!” is a multimedia production featuring photographs by Cig Harvey and Scott Anthony Smith; collages by Tammam Azzam; paintings by Natasha Mayers; a short film by Dylan Itkin; and original recordings by Mary Anne Driscoll and Curran Reynolds of Body Stuff. It is directed by Scott Anthony Smith.
Itkin has been writing and performing in Maine for over 35 years. Most recently, she was in the reading of “Lost and Guided” by Irene Kapustina; and has had roles in many Everyman productions including Givola in “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” Nat in “Rabbit Hole” and Carrie Watts in “The Trip to Bountiful.”
Tickets are $20; $10 students, available online at everymanrep.org. The tour continues Sept. 20 through 23 at the Portland Ballet Studio Theater; Sept. 29 and 30 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland; Oct. 5 at the UMaine Hutchinson Center in Belfast; Oct. 18 and 19 at The Theater Project in Brunswick; and Oct. 27 and 28 at the Michael Klahr Center in Augusta.
Scott Anthony Smith 