Great Barrington Public Theater Presents
By Anne Undeland
Directed by Judy Braha July 10th thru July 27th McConnell Theater
By Maggie Kearnan
Directed by Clay Hopper June 5th thru June 22nd Liebowitz Black Box Theater
The Best Medicine
By Robin Gerber
Directed by Matthew Penn August 1st thru August 17th McConnell Theater
TICKETS AVAILABLE AT: www. greatbarringtonpublictheater. org Box Office: 413-372-1980 • boxoffice @ greatbarringtonpublictheater. org ever seen a cannon before. They were very interested in it. As we were showing one of the soldiers our cannon, they were sharing with us the virtues of their hard cider and whiskey. People are people, no matter what age they are. The Bible, the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes, says there ' s nothing new under the sun, meaning that human nature doesn ' t change. What you find once you remove the sentimental and the superficial are very, very complex people who seem a lot like us in their motivations, a lot like us in their inclinations and in their contradictions, and that ' s really surprising.
So you ' ll get to know all the more or less famous people, like Henry Knox, but you ' ll also know his wife, Lucy, who loses because she becomes a Patriot and the rest of her family remain loyal to the Crown. She loses her father, her mother, her brother, and her sisters who stay in Boston and disavow her, and she ends up married to this guy with an improbable and not guaranteed future. He was a officer in the Continental Army, she has a child and travels with him from Boston once British leave there, then to New York, where the next great battles will be, and onward. You begin to understand characters. In many ways, the Continental Army, at the end, is filled with teenagers and felons and ne’ er-do-wells and second and third sons without a chance of an inheritance, recent immigrants— German as well as from the British Isles. It was a very motley crew and not the sort of sturdy land-owning militiamen that our folktales led us to believe. They’ re there, too, but the reliable folks who stay for the duration are this ragtag group of people who are then going to want some of these highfalutin rights that people are talking about, as well. It ' s just an interesting dynamic. Democracy wasn ' t the object of the Revolution. It was just one of the consequences of it.
Stanmeyer: Did you come to the Berkshires for the filming?
Burns: Not me. I was shooting in another place at that time, but Buddy Squires and our co-producer, Megan Ruffe, supervised the shooting there in very difficult circumstances, I must say. But the footage is gorgeous, and we look forward to sharing it when we get to the Capital region.
Stanmeyer: What have you found that has been interesting in your travels in promoting the series?
Burns: No matter where we go, no matter who we talk to, people are flabbergasted and constantly say,“ I had no idea.” We ' ve been to West Point and received the shouts and huzzahs of 1,500 cadets. We ' ve been in Boston, we ' ve been in Lexington, we ' ve been in Concord. We ' ve been with students. We ' ve been with historians. We ' ve been to social studies teachers. They had a convention in November in Boston. We went to New York for the American Historical Association. We ' ve
94 // BERKSHIRE MAGAZINE Holiday August July 2025 2025 2023