by Jason Velázquez

This is the Top Left Corner. Today is Saturday, May 25, and you’re listening to episode #72. I’m your host, Jason Velazquez, and as always, thank you for tuning in. We have a huge show for you this week. We start off with a short hop over to Lenox where we check in with Shakespeare & Company, whose 2019 season kicks off with the Wavery Gallery. Then we spend the remainder of our show at Hancock Shaker Village, which begins its season with the opening of two major installations, Borrowed Light: Barbara Ernst Prey, and While Mighty Thunders Roll: Popular Artists Sing the Shakers, produced by Jeffrey Gaskill. We’ll finish up with some key segments of my conversation with Matt Lorenz known by his one-man band — The Suitcase Junket. Oh, and we’ve got some boss tracks from his new album to share with you, too.

SWAG for sustaining members! • • • • • • • • • • CLICK HEREHey, friends! Thank you so much for contributing what you can to propel YOUR Indie alternative newsthing forward. Enjoy FULL-LENGTH conversations both with Barbara Ernst Prey and with Matt Lorenz of The Suitcase Junket right here. Not a member? We can fix that.

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Thanks for staying with us, and now, on with the show.

The Waverly Gallery

Shakespeare & Company opens their 2019 season, “The Strings of the Heart,” with Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery. The tale, by turns wrenching or hysterical, tours the loss-before-the-loss a family experiences as their matriarch succumbs to dementia.

Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, at Shakespeare & Company through July 11; (from left) Michael F. Toomey, David Bertoldi, Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Annette Miller, and David Gow; photo by Daniel Rader.

Directer Tina Packer said, in an official release, “The Waverly Gallery is a very insightful, very funny, and very painful play,” said Director Tina Packer. “It deals with something we are all going to have to face,