Oh! What A Poetical War!

2016 HEAR Now Festival Featured Programming:

                         Oh! What A Poetical War!
                                                                                Saturday, June 11th, 1:00pm-2:30pm
                                                                                   World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial
                                                                         This live performance is free and open to the public
                                                                                   in the Auditorium of the WWI Museum

This program showcases the popular poetry of the time before and during the Great War: the Music Hall songs; the songs the soldiers sang; the poems that served as recruitments in verse; and a sampling of the serious poems, from the War Poets, many of whom died in the trenches, or surviving against the odds, devoted the rest of their lives to honoring their comrades by telling and retelling the truths of that war.
Oh! What a Poetical War! concludes with a multimedia sampling of the songs created by poets and musicians inspired by the war which resonates to our day.

Helen Engelhardt

Helen Engelhardt
(Host & Co-Producer)

Helen is an author, poet, storyteller and independent audio artist whose work has often reflected the needs for social justice in the U.S. and around the world.

She has been active in peace, justice and environmental causes for over thirty years.

Her original play "Never Again War: The Sacrifice of Käthe Kollwitz," which began as a stage play and was adapted for audio in 2015, was presented at the National WWI Museum as part of last year's HEAR Now Festival and went on to win a Gracie Award and has received two nominations for the 2016 New York Festivals.

Along with developing this program for HEAR Now, Helen will perform and share some of her experiences touring the Western Front, attending the nightly ceremony at the Menin Gate in Ypres.

Ellen Stewart

Ellen Stewart (Co-Producer)

Ellen has spent a lifetime as a theatre director/producer/actor in Sonora, California where she was Artistic Director for Columbia Actors’ Repertory and Mountain Actor’s Conservatory. She is a professor emeritus of theatre and speech at Columbia College.

In San Francisco, she improvised with Bay Area Theatre Sports Sunday Night Players.

She served as producer for the first two “live” shows for HEAR Now: The Audio Fiction and Arts Festival in 2013 and 2014, following twelve years participating with the National Audio Theatre Festivals as actor and director for numerous audio productions.

This year at HEAR Now, she is co-producing and performing in Oh! What a Poetical War! and Celebrating Mark Twain!

For the past several years, she has been developing a new radio station in her community, KAAD-LP, scheduled to begin broadcasting in late summer.

Featured In the Cast:

Robert Fass

Robert Fass

Robert is a two-time Audie winner with over 125 unabridged audiobooks to his credit. He has earned multiple
Earphones Awards and is often found listed among AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of the Year. He appeared
at the HEAR Now Festival last year recreating his role as Peter Kollwitz in the award-winning audio drama
NEVER AGAIN WAR: The Sacrifice of Käthe Kollwitz.

So far this year, among others, he’s been honored to narrate such acclaimed works as Adam Haslett’s IMAGINE ME GONE, Álvaro Enrigue’s kaleidoscopic SUDDEN DEATH, David Dyer’s THE MIDNIGHT WATCH, George Plimpton’s baseball classic OUT OF MY LEAGUE, and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s THE YEAR OF LEAR.

With Additional Voices By: