A Glorious Space for City Drama

by Mea Kaemmerlen

Trenton, NJ

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Last Friday night I went to the theater with a friend. She was pretty beat up. She's a high school English teacher -- grueling enough -- but last week Trenton Central High School was in testing mode. Her normal schedule, sacred to harried teachers, was cast to the winds.

We went to Mill Hill Playhouse in Trenton where I've been going for 15 years and have never seen a bad show. It's home to the splendid Passage Theatre Company which, at the moment, is having its Solo Flight Festival, 16 performances of nine different one-person productions.

Friday night's show was "Metamorphoses," where, for 90 riveting minutes, writer and performer Todd Conner breathed fire into the words of Ovid, Rome's celebrated poet and storyteller. He paired the fervors, frolics and foibles of Olympus' gods and goddesses with musings on the human condition.

At the end, my numb and exhausted friend was in metamorphosis herself. There were tears in her eyes. "This was wonderful. I feel inspired, nourished, energized," she said The theater was a tonic for her and, no doubt, for the 80 students she leads through the tangles of English literature.

I, too, was transformed. I'd planned to go to one or two Solo Flights shows in March, but was so taken with Friday's show that, on Saturday, I had a second helping. And back for more on Sunday. Not the usual couch-potato/ take-out-Chinese/ Turner-Classic-Movies weekend.

Passage Theatre has been offering strong, professional theater in Trenton for 21 years. Its stage, the Mill Hill Playhouse, is an old stone church, once reverberating with hymns and homilies. After a fire, ownership of the church ceded to the city, which continues to own and maintain it. The church was deconsecrated and built into a theater, with the sanctuary as stage and the lower floor as lobby.

A glorious space for drama, it is small, seating only 120 in banked, comfortable seats. The roof soars; the inside walls are of stone and studded with outlines of arched windows, where once stained glass played with the light.