1994-97 Show Photos

The Owl and the Pussycat was the first play I did with The ActorsNet of Bucks County, then in its second season. I had seen their production of The Petrified Forest the previous season. That show is one with which I had fallen in love upon seeing the production a few years earlier at The Shaw Festival in Niagara on the Lake, Ontario. Seeing that compelling but infrequently produced show mounted so well by a local company made me want to work with them. And I told Cheryl Doyle, one of the company's co-founders, so.

And it was the first time I worked with Joe Doyle, co-founding director along with his wife Cheryl, of the ActorsNet.

It marked the beginning of a long and pleasurable (and on-going) relationship with The ActorsNet.

That coupled with the familiarity of working in The Artist's Showcase Theater, where I had performed in many Shakespeare`70 productions since 1990 AND the added bonus of working with a lovely and talented actress, Kimberly Eberhardt, made the experience all the more pleasurable.

Kimberly Eberhardt was a Philadelphia based actress, who went on to try her luck in New York City shortly after this production. A oddly synergistic coincidence was also working. My last name - Hartpence - is an Anglicization of the two German names of my ancestor who immigrated to America in the middle 1700's. Johannes Eberhardt Penz, the founder of the family in America (not yet the United States), moved to Hunterdon County, New Jersey and contracted his last name into something a little easier to say and sounding more like his new neighbors' names. So Eberhardt Penz became Hartpence. Another relative in the middle of the 1900's further simplified his last name to help advance his political aspirations and thereby, Gary Hartpence became Gary Hart - today one of our country's leading elder statesmen. So by way of making a long story amusing, I told Kimberly that surely we must be related somewhere way back in our family trees.

A final "first" for me, this was the first performance in which I participated where an audience member contacted the theater to say that seeing our show had resulted in a "life changing" experience for her and her husband. It seems she and her husband hadn't been communicating with each other for a very long time when they came to see our show at the Pebble Hill Church Peace Center. However, after watching Doris and Felix work out their differences on stage, the couple sat down after the show and began to talk again. She called to thank us. The power of theater!

George Hartpence