Judevine at Oldcastle Theatre Company

David Budbill's "Judevine" is the most popular and beloved play in the 48 year history of Oldcastle Theatre Company, and has been produced four times by OTC beginning in 1988 but has been absent from the theatre's schedule since 2004. "Theatres, as with libraries, should make available the classics and "Judevine" is a classic American play," according to Oldcastle's Producing Artistic Director Eric Peterson, who has directed all of the company's previous four productions. "David's extraordinary play is lyrical, funny, thoughtful and thought-provoking, a bit scarey at times, sexy, ribald, and poetic." Peterson said. Set in a fictional Vermont town the play introduces a large variety of characters making their lives in the rural Hamlet, scrapping a living out of logging, planting and harvesting Christmas trees, and other backbreaking work. Budbill's people are Vietnam vets, frazzled mothers trying to feed children on too few dollars, snowmobilers who long for clear, cold winter days gliding through snow covered woods, machinists, storekeepers, and hippies who've abandoned cities searching for a different kind of life and find one more difficult, yet somehow more fulfilling than their previous life. There's Doug, who doesn't like to work too much in the winter because it interferes with his snomachin'," Grace a fragile young woman with a darkness in her past who might have found salvation in Tommy a Vietnam vet, Black French Canadian Antoine who is a laborer and part-time philosopher and many more.