Friday, March 18th at 7:00pm
South Church  343 Broadway
Dobbs Ferry, NY 10522

Tickets: $25

RiverArts presents Kindness Committee, a new play written and directed by Melanie Hoopes on Friday, March 18th and 19th at 7:00pm; This play is recommended for ages 13 and up.

Set at a concert on a cold winter night, Kindness Committee sneaks us into the minds of seven audience members connected by varying degrees to one another. As the musician performs, each character’s inner world ignites. Some desire, others despise. One mourns, another commits to a life of living without a past. One warns of the limits of “kindness” while another embodies the act of forgiving. All of them peel away layers of their past as they reach for a sustainable present.

Kindness Committee delves deep into longings and forebodings, and examines the increasing importance of strengthening our community as our social, political and environmental problems mount.

Inspired by a concert by Bay Area-based singer/songwriter John Elliott, Hoopes creates a fictitious world of characters interacting with one another, the music and the afterglow it creates. Elliott generously lends his music to weave through Kindness Committee, allowing the audience to be transported to the concert the characters attend.

Melanie Hoopes, a Hastings on Hudson resident, brought us last season’s zoom performance of Six Feet, a play about living in the age of Covid. With Kindness Committee, Hoopes asks us to once again examine the present moment. As we accept our current reality, we ask ourselves how we want to live moving forward. What must we fortifiy and what gets recycled? Like Six Feet, Kindness Committee is darkly funny and sure to touch all hearts and souls.

“John’s performance four years ago with Common Ground Concerts started it all. His breathtakingly honest and personal songwriting awed me. I was captivated by his descriptions of regrets and defenses, exposing them all, no matter how misshapen or how ugly. John treats his past with kindness and compassion and in doing this he invites the audience to do their own inventory with the same open-hearted approach. I began writing Kindness Committee to explore how others may have experienced John’s show but somewhere along the way it became a treatise on community. My conclusion is simple and needs to be screamed from the rooftops and tattooed on our arms: We are all we have. The survival of all beings and our beautiful planet depends on the strength of our relation to one another.”

About Melanie Hoopes, Writer and Director

Melanie Hoopes is a writer whose credits include Six Feet: A Play About What’s Between Us (RiverArts), Lethal Lit (IHeartRadio, EEP), One Giant Leap: The Apollo Moon Landing 50 Years On (The New York Times) and  Bloodline (Netflix). She is the creator and writer of the long-running New York-based episodic stage show, Laurie Stanton’s Sound Diet, a dark, modern twist on Prairie Home Companion. Her public radio credits include This American Life, Here’s the Thing and Unfictional. She is a producer and host of Yesteryear: Stories from Home, a podcast about the history of living in a small village on the Hudson River. She lives in the Rivertowns with her family.

About John Elliott, Composer

A native of Minnesota now living in California, John Elliott has a worldwide following as a singer-songwriter. The Austin Chronicle writes John Elliott is “a legend among songwriters…bold and brave…his shows are not to be missed.” Cory Frye of the Corvallis Gazette-Times writes that Elliott has, “an affection for the malleability of language, the clever twists of phrase, an appreciation for the liquid kinship between rhythm and sounds — how they collide in beautiful violence, how they stand as ideas and images — even if they ordinarily wouldn’t deign to dance together or be seen in the same room.”

While John has toured internationally since 2006 and his songs have been prominently heard on TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree Hill, and Californication, he remains an independent, unsigned, and unaffiliated artist, and he is proud of that fact. Calling himself a “songcyclist” for his eco-friendly propensity for pedaling his bike from one small venue to the next, Elliott continues to build a dedicated following the old-fashioned way: one new believer at a time.

Chuck Schiele of The San Diego Troubadour says, “John Elliott’s lyrics get in, make their statement, kick you in the teeth, and get out before they start talking too much…And this lends to the urge of rolling any track to its beginning for another spin.”

In addition to contributing his music to Kindness Committee, John will perform a live concert on March 26th at Common Ground Concerts. MORE INFO HERE.