By Patricia Snyder For InPlay Capital Region Read contest rules here
I produced more than 300 plays in my lifetime and directed at least 40 of them. “Our Town” and “Amadeus” are plays that continue to affect and inform me in different ways each time I see them. However the play that had the most significant impact on me in my life time is not a play that can compete with either of those plays on a literary basis but it brought me a lifetime of love. I was a senior in high school and was cast as Bella, a settlement house gang member in Reginald Rose’s play, “Dino”. Our English teacher, Alan Phillips was the director but he selected a student to assist him who had just come to our school from a prep school in New Jersey who wore a tweed jacket with leather patches, smoked a pipe, loved music and had a lot of Theatre credits to his name. One day in rehearsal the student assistant criticized my speech, specifically my flat A. I was not pleased and vowed to knock the chip off his shoulder. Five years later I married that prep school kid, William Fortune Snyder and we lived happily together for 58 years.
