Director Jayne Pleasants
The Highlands-Cashiers Players’ successful season continues August 27 through September 6 with Grace and Glorie by Tom Ziegler, a touching dramatic comedy about two very different women who discover peace, hope, and meaning through an unexpected friendship.
The story centers on Grace Stiles, a strong-willed 90-year-old woman who has spent her entire life in a rural mountain community and is now facing terminal cancer. After leaving the hospital, Grace chooses to spend her remaining days at home, surrounded by the comfort of the life she has always known.
Enter Glorie, a recent transplant to the area who retired from a demanding corporate career in the city. Still grieving the loss of her child, Glorie volunteers with hospice and is assigned to visit and care for Grace.
At first, the two women clash. Grace is stubborn, fiercely independent, spiritual, and skeptical of outside assistance, while Glorie is educated, anxious, and struggling to find her footing. Despite their differences in background, beliefs, and personality, the women gradually begin sharing their stories, fears, regrets, and hopes. Through humor, honesty, and compassion, they forge a remarkable friendship.
Director Jayne Pleasants is excited to helm her first production for the Highlands-Cashiers Players after several years serving in production and technical roles.
In addition to her work with HCP, Pleasants volunteered for many years with Seven Stages Theatre in Atlanta, where she served in numerous capacities, including director. She has also appeared in stage productions and, along with her ex-husband, Phil Pleasants, performed a touring outdoor drama.
Pleasants believes audiences will connect with this poignant comedy, which explores themes of friendship, respect, loss, healing, dignity in death, resilience of the human spirit, spirituality, and the importance of genuine human connection in an increasingly impersonal and polarized world.
After reading the play and getting to know the characters, Pleasants was especially fascinated by the life lessons each of these women learned from the other. How unlikely is it that Glorie, a highly educated woman from the city, and Grace, a mountain woman who remains illiterate at age 90 but is sharp-witted and rich in life experience, would find so much common ground?
While Grace and Glorie addresses serious and deeply emotional subjects, it does so with warmth and humor and strikes a perfect balance between laughter and reflection.
Visit HighlandsCashiersPlayers.com for tickets, or by calling or visiting the PAC box office at 507 Chestnut Street, (828) 526-9047.
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