28-03-2025
Tupelo Community Theatre wins at Southeastern Theatre Conference, set to compete at national level
TUPELO — For only the second time, Tupelo Community Theatre will compete nationally at the American Association of Community Theatre Festival after winning Best Production at the 2025 Southeastern Theatre Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, last weekend.
The play, "Tone Clusters," was written by Joyce Carol Oates, is directed by Jonathan Martin and features original music composed by Jason Bahr. The group sought out a performance piece that was relatively obscure, something the judges and audience wouldn't have seen a dozen times.
"We wanted to find a piece that could be topical in its themes and was malleable in terms of the way that you could present it," Jonathan Martin said. "The story is about a married couple in their 50s who have an adult child accused of murdering a 14-year-old neighborhood girl. This is revealed through an interview taking place inside of what appears to be a TV studio."
The show requires only three actors: Haley Johnson plays Emily Gulick, Jamie Fair plays Frank Gulick, and John Carroll plays "The Voice" and serves as a narrator.
"Tone Clusters" incorporates multimedia elements, including two television monitors that are livestreaming via cameras onstage filming closeups of the two actors and a large movie theater-type screen that shows various images.
The final production differs significantly from the script, Lisa Martin, TCT executive director and assistant director for "Tone Clusters," said.
"That's unique to Jonathan as a director," she said.
The cast and crew identified themes they wanted to explore and made creative decisions that supported those themes.
For example, in emphasizing issues of truth versus non-truth and the testing of beliefs, they made the set decor and costumes black, white and gray in color until the last two minutes of the show.
"Nothing has any color in it," Jonathan Martin said. "It's washed out. It also gives the play the tone of a 'Twilight Zone' episode."
Scenes were divided into chapters with Quentin Tarantino-style chapter titles, Jonathan Martin said. Folded into the titles are questions that are fundamental to epistemology, the study of knowledge and why people believe what they believe, and all of those questions return at the end after the narrative has fully unfolded for the audience.
"We want to entertain and provoke and encourage the audience to think a little longer about the show after it's over," he said.
The parameters set for performances provide an additional challenge. The entire set must fit in a 10-by-10 box, and participants are given 10 minutes to set up, 60 minutes to perform and another 10 minutes to return their set to the box.
"You have to think ahead of time about what kind of set you're going to use," Jonathan Martin said. "Because you could have a gorgeous set to perform here at the Lyric or at TCT Off Broadway, but if it's not mobile and if it can't bend and fit inside a 10-by-10 box, it's useless for competition."
TCT participates each year in the Mississippi Theatre Association competition. Lisa Martin recalled entering a show at the MTA at 19 years old.
"It was something that was very important to the theater itself, but also Tom Booth, who was very passionate about it," Lisa Martin said of TCT's late executive director. "He directed the majority of those shows that we took to MTA, and we had great success over the years."
The Top 2 productions at the Mississippi Theatre Association move on to the Southeastern Theatre Conference each year, and the Top 2 productions regionally move on to the American Association of Community Theatre Festival, which is held bi-yearly on calendar years that end in odd numbers.
After the Mississippi Theatre Association competition in January, TCT moved on to the Southeastern Theatre Conference this month and brought home the Best Production award at the Community Theatre Festival. All three performers — Johnson, Fair and Carroll — brought home Outstanding Performance honors, and the production was recognized for Outstanding Technical Design.
The award-winning group will represent Tupelo, Mississippi and the South nationally this summer.
The 2025 AACT Festival, set for June 25-28 in Des Moines, Iowa, is dubbed "America's National Community Theatre Festival," is affiliated with more than 7,000 community theaters across the United States.
"We are now in the final 12 productions in the country," Jonathan Martin said.
"If you're not a theater person, this is kind of like our Super Bowl," Johnson added. "This is a really big deal for us. It's a lot of pressure, but either way, whether we win or don't win it's still just amazing to be able to compete at that level."
Lisa Martin said the opportunity to take a small, obscure show to compete nationally is a testament to local theater and speaks volumes to the passion and talent in Tupelo.
Preview shows ahead of competition performances were hosted at TCT Off Broadway, and an additional show will be hosted in June ahead of the competition in Iowa.
"There is good and meaningful artistic work generated by amateur artists in this area that I hope makes the community proud and also encourages the community to come out and see more of it when we present productions locally," Jonathan Martin said. "They can have confidence that some talented people are volunteering their time to present high quality productions right here at home."
