Mad Horse Theatre Company plans to present “Dying to Know” by David Butler in a special limited engagement Dec. 2-12.

Show times are 7:30 pm. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and 5 p.m. Sundays.

Directed by Mad Horse Company Member Nick Schroeder.

The original play is by Maine playwright David Butler, which he wrote and revised over the last 10 years. Mad Horse produced a staged reading of “Dying to Know” via it’s By Local program in 2015.

With tenderness and humor “Dying to Know” explores our struggle to come to terms with death.

The play is about the friendship between a hospice volunteer named Maura and a young patient, Caroline, who is battling cancer. The two women navigate a tenuous friendship around the shared mutual obsession with the subject of death, leading Maura to reveries and visitations from those who carried the doubt, grief and love of her past.

David and his wife Maureen Butler are longtime friends of the Maine theater community. David is an author, a playwright and an actor and Maureen is an actor and poet. David is also a reverend at Days Ferry Congregational Church in Woolwich, and spent decades at the Congregational Church of Gorham as well as senior pastor in three other congregations. David is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary. He has worked as a hospital chaplain and prison chaplain, where he tried to help people find “a core of faith in the extremes of life.”

The play is shaped by David’s own life as a faith leader and, as a self-described Christian agnostic, his reckoning with the unanswerable questions of an afterlife. The play frames the spiritual world not as a transcendental force, but as a presence, an action, that holds living beings together here on Earth.

“Faith itself doesn’t mean nearly as much until it is shared; until we become part of some larger whole.”

The cast includes company member Janice Gardner and guest artists, Hannah Daly and Paul Haley.

The production team includes company members: Nick Schroeder (director/sound design); Mark Rubin (producer), Stacey Koloski (set/props) and guest artists: Michaela Denoncourt (lighting design), Savannah Irish (costumes), and Lauren Stockless (stage manager).

All shows will be performed without an intermission and are pay-what-you-decide. No charge reservations are strongly suggested.

To connect with Mad Horse Theatre Company visit madhorse.com or email to madhorseboxoffice@gmail.com.

 

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