CRYSTAL RADIO SESSIONS UPSTATE
Saturday, july 11 at 8pm

Free; Presented virtually
Advance reservations requested

Featuring:
“Too Young for The Blues”
a short story by Wesley Brown
read by MaConnia Chesser
& AnnChris Warren

Download the evening’s playbill HERE!

Online reservations have closed for the performance. Please email us at info@ancramoperahouse.org or call 518-329-0114 to receive the link to attend the show.

Wesley Brown's "Too Young for The Blues," a short story about a chance meeting between Ella Fitzgerald and a fan, will be read by regional actors MaConnia Chesser and AnnChris Warren at the next Crystal Radio Sessions Upstate on Saturday, July 11. The story is from Dance of the Infidels, Brown's latest collection that summons up a long-gone New York City, one that moved in the frenetic rhythms of jazz.

Wesley Brown is the author of three novels, as well as four produced plays. He is the co-editor of a fiction multicultural anthology Imagining America and a nonfiction multicultural anthology Visions of America, and he is editor of The Teachers & Writers Guide to Frederick Douglass. He is professor emeritus in English at Rutgers University (1979-2005) and was a Visiting Writer at Sarah Lawrence College in 2015. Mr. Brown has been teaching at Simon's Rock since 2007.

MaConnia Chesser is a company member at Shakespeare & Co. whose regional theater credits include Actors’ Shakespeare Project, WAM Theatre, Chester Theatre, Kennedy Center, NJ Rep (company member), Theater Alliance (INSURRECTION: HOLDING HISTORY, Helen Hayes nomination), Ensemble Studio Theatre & Folger Theatre. Her film and TV credits include The Shape of Destiny (Official Selection, 2018 Women in Comedy Festival), and HBO’s The Wire. 

AnnChris Warren is Director of Operations for Boys & Girls Club of Ulster County. Past directing credits include HAIRSPRAY, FOR COLORED GIRLS WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF, BYE BYE BIRDIE, PIPPIN, and CINDERELLA. Performance credits include the title role in AIDA, JoAnne in RENT, Dionne in HAIR, Cassie in A CHORUS LINE, Justice in ROCK OF AGES, and the Witch in INTO THE WOODS.

CRYSTAL RADIO SESSIONS showcases fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction and personal essays by established and emerging writers from the Hudson Valley and is curated by the Millerton-based writer Ashley Mayne, whose work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Fence, Post Road, Juked, Metambesen and elsewhere. CRYSTAL RADIO believes in the power of the spoken word and is devoted to transmitting compelling literary expression through the ether.