LETTERS READ

Wrapping-up the 2021 Doing Business in New Orleans season is a true, rags to riches story. Another incubator-style, informal production, with stuff found along the way. That may or may not fit into full-length Letters Read, Louisiana and New Orleans-centric, programming. This material surfaced while researching the Clay Shaw story. That story is postponed until 2022. Shaw is referred to more than...

Premiering Thursday, November 25, letters and ephemera created in 1962 by a local professional association for graphic designers. If you liked the TV show, Mad Men , you’ll love the real thing, New Orleans-style. Art Directors and Designers Association of New Orleans (ADDA) was chartered in 1961. Illustrators, lettering artists, art directors, photographers, commercial artists, and graphic de...

As prelude to the Thanksgiving, 2021 reading, we share advertising executive Ron Thomson's story about the letter he wrote to motion picture actress, Audrey Hepburn , and the friendship that ensued. Thomson is President - Marketing, Beuerman Miller Fitzgerald, Inc . The oldest agency in the southern United States. By the time they met, Hepburn had already starred in Breakfast at Tiffany's , Charad...

Welcome to this reading from a handmade, 1906 photo-album compiled in response to the last documented yellow fever outbreak in New Orleans and the United States.  The podcast is fourteenth in the ongoing, Letters Read project. Readers are William Bowling and Grace Kennedy with audio production by Steve Chyzyk and Sonic Canvas Studio . Antenna is the project’s fiscal partner, and, 2021 is the...

As a bit of comic relief to the July 15th, 2021 podcast, "Bananas Anyone", Letters Read project director Nancy Sharon Collins puts forth her science fiction theory to her neighbor, microbiology scholar Claiborne Christian, Ph. D., Tulane University, New Orleans. The following snippet was recorded on her deck, during a typical, New Orleans thunderstorm. You will hear the pouring rain. The distinct...

This reading is of personal letters from Edgar Degas surrounding his 4-month stay in Reconstruction-era New Orleans. Christopher Kamenstein reads as Degas; audio production is by Steve Chyzyk and Sonic Canvas studio. The event is emceed by stationer and Letters Read director Nancy Sharon Collins. Join us here for an intimate listen to thoughts and emotions experienced by Edgar Degas as he visits h...

A prelude to the March 25, 2021 reading, The Letters of Edgar Degas , hosted by  Pitot House  and co-promoted by  Alliance Française de La Nouvelle-Orléans . Michel is Edgar Degas’s maternal uncle. Pitot House was once owned by Degas's maternal grandmother. In this reading, Michel writes of his son, Eugene Henri, 9 years of age, whose illness and death are documented. The letters, S...

December 31st, 2020: A remote interview with two professional actors, George Saucier and Colin Miller in Lafayette, Louisiana.  With ten questions as a format, this production threads excerpts from a two-hour conversation between George and Colin about being an actor, theatre as an art form, ruminations about Tennessee Williams, the Southern Gothic genre, and the arc of one’s career. In colla...

This outtake is from the 16th full LETTERS READ production, to be podcast here on New Year’s Eve this year. George Saucier talks about the theatricality of southern archetypes while Collin Miller responds. Intended for a March 2020 reading, from which the full-production and this snippet evolved, this event was to restage the 2018 Letters Read script about the arc of Tennessee Williams's career. P...

Yesterday, the number of people with the coronavirus who died in the United States exceeded 300,000. Today we offer another incubator-style, experimental reading from primary source material: Excerpted letters from Baron Joseph-Xavier Delfau de Pontalba written from New Orleans during the first documented Yellow Fever epidemic there. It was recorded in Sonic Canvas Studio with audio producers Stev...

November 30, 2020, hosted by Bastion | Community of Resilience , Gentilly, New Orleans. Featuring William Bowling , reader, Steve Chyzyk , and Steve Himelfarb, audio producers. Robert, “Bob” Stuart was born in 1923, just three years after women in this country were allowed to vote. Originally from Shreveport, Louisiana. He served in the Navy during WWII, was honorably discharged in May 1946, and l...

Thursday, August 20, 2020: Blanchard, “Skip” Ward was a gay activist in rural Louisiana during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and into the beginning of the 21st century. His home was in Pineville. Skip became increasingly involved in LGBTQIA activism in the early 1980s when he first came out. Or, as he would have phrased it, “came up front” about his sexuality. He co-founded the Unitarian/Universal...

The 14th Letters Read event and first produced entirely as a podcast. The usual, live reading was scheduled for March 26, 2020 at Frenchman Art & Books on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans. It was preempted by the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. Listen to Dylan Hunter as the voice of our subject. Rebecca Hollingsworth is Anne. Both self-recorded in the safety of their own home. Our emcee is...

As an experiment with potential material for LETTERS READ, this was the first in a series of live recordings for the 2020 programming season. A work in progress, this set of letters developed into the April, 2020 podcast of Stewart Butler letters. The letters in both readings were from a large wooden chest in Butler’s home, the Faerie Playhouse. A Letters Read sponsor, the LGBT+ Archives Project o...

Wednesday, September 25, 2019 The Cabildo Louisiana State Museum The Louisiana Museum Foundation , Louisiana State Museum,  Letters Read ,  Antenna , and stationer  Nancy Sharon Collins  bring an intimate, performative evening celebrating our love for history and architecture, and a unique understanding of our relationship with property. A special reading in which professi...

Saturday, July 20, 2019 6:00 to 7:30 pm Crescent City Books 124 Baronne Street, New Orleans, across from the Roosevelt Hotel. Thanks to Susan Larson and George Ingmire for this recording and including it on their show, Thinking Outside the Book on New Orleans Public Radio. ABC@PM , Crescent City Books , and LETTERS READ present a second open mic night for book nerds. CODEX is a conversation about...

Sunday November 25, 2018
 3:30 to 5:00pm 
St. John the Baptist Catholic Church 
1139 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd. 
New Orleans, LA. Twenty years ago, a Northshore, LA developer worked with New Orleans Mayor Morial, two City Council members and two Central City clergymen to demolish a 4-square city block area between St. Mary and Polymnia streets, Baronne and an altered Carondelet Streets. W...

Wednesday, February 13, 2019 6:00 to 7:30 pm Nora Navra Library , 1902 St. Bernard Avenue Free and open to the public. Mack Guillory III , Emcee. Julie Dietz , Reader. The historic fight for civil rights in New Orleans is more complicated than most movements in the other 49 United States. Prior to Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era, free people of color here could legally own property. Free pers...

Though Janet Mary Riley did not define herself as a second wave feminist, by today’s standards, she was a quiet but fierce civil rights advocate and tireless women’s rights activist. Throughout her life, she fought for equal pay in the workplace. This event is dedicated to her successful efforts to revise Louisiana’s community property laws giving women equal management rights of a marriage’s comm...

As part of researching the world of Tennessee Williams and his later life living, part-time, in New Orleans French Quarter, LETTERS READ producer Nancy Sharon Collins interviewed Dorian Bennett. Williams befriended Bennett in the 1980s, This is an edited moment from that interview. Image: 722 Toulouse Street, ca. 1930s : A photo of 722 Toulouse Street that is thought to date to the 1930s. At the e...

Welcome to LETTERS READ, sixth in the series of live events in which local artists interpret personal letters written by culturally vital individuals from various times and New Orleans communities presented by stationer Nancy Sharon Collins and Antenna. Thanks to New Orleans Tennessee Williams Literary Festival and especially to Susan Larson whose idea it was for LETTERS READ to perform The Luck o...

Welcome to PART II of LETTERS READ: Text Dating. This is sixth in the ongoing series of live events in which local artists interpret personal letters written by culturally vital individuals from various times and New Orleans communities presented by me, Nancy Sharon Collins, and Antenna. Thanks go to Antenna, Press Street, Paper Machine! If you don’t already know, Paper Machine is the new, bricks...

Welcome to PART I in the fifth installment of LETTERS READ. The ongoing series of live events in which local artists interpret personal letters written by culturally vital individuals from various times and New Orleans communities presented by me, Nancy Sharon Collins, and Antenna. Thanks to Antenna, Press Street, Paper Machine, and to contributors Mikita Brottman, Kyle Petrozza, John Rushing, Cat...

When Peter Rogers was a young man, he moved from Hattiesburg, MS, to Manhattan. He was so poor he took in a roommate to help share the rent. Introduced by fellow Hattiesburg-ites back home, Peter's roommate was non other than Jim Adams, Tennessee Williams’s cousin. In this short, Rogers recalls the evening Williams breezed into town, treated them to the Broadway play, Duel of Angels, with Vivien L...

Through live readings of letters written during War I and World War II, LETTERS READ: Veterans Day presented little moments where lives of military service members and civilians intersected. The November 11, 2017 reading focused on love letters from The National World War II Museum, letters from United States Army Air Force officer Francis I. Cervantes (1922-1945) to his mother while training for...