Ben Elliot, left, Creative Director of Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington and Andrew Sodroski, screenwriter of the movie “Holland” introduce the film at a special screening on March 22. Sodroski warned the audience thatthe film is, “Bonkers, twisty, fun.”and “a wild and crazy ride.”
The Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington offered a special screening of the movie “Holland” on March 22 with the screenwriter of the film, Andrew Sodroski, on hand after the film to answer questions. He is a resident of Berkshire County.
“Holland” stars Nicole Kidman, Matthew Macfadyen, who plays her husband, and Gael Garcia Bernal, who plays her friend. Before the start of the film, Sodroski warned the audience that it would be a “wild and crazy ride” but also “bonkers, twisty, fun.”
“The whole movie is about what you see and don’t see. The surface versus underneath,” said Sodroski.
This film delves deep below the surface into the ways that darkness exists in the worst possible cases. Anyone viewing the film should be aware that at its core is a serious mental illness and should bear that in mind should they decide to watch.
The film takes place in Holland, Michigan, which Sodroski chose because he wanted a “specific place with a specific subculture.” In Holland, they celebrate their Dutch heritage with a yearly festival complete with Dutch costumes, wooden shoes, traditional Dutch dancing, a parade, windmills, and tulips. Sodroski used this surface for a “technicolor experience. A sort of dreamworld which in a little while is ripped away.”He admitted to being influenced by his admiration of David Lynch’s films.
In the movie’s Holland, “Smooth surfaces matter. When you leave your house, you always look presentable.”
The movie begins with Kidman’s character having lost a pearl earring (calling to mind Dutch painter Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring”) and in her search of her perfect house and her husband’s model train shed, she finds indications of his secret life. At first imagining an affair, she finds an even deeper, darker secret.
During the question-and-answer period, Sodrosky explained that he wrote the screenplay soon after film school, thirteen years ago. He said that “Holland” was on the Black List, “a list of all the most popular unproduced screenplays which have been bought but never seen,” for many years. These scripts are passed amid other screenwriters, producers, and directors. They vote for the best and “Holland” topped the list in 2013.
Sodrosky thought this meant “Holland” would soon be developed into a film, but it took years to find financing, a cast, and a director. “Finally,” he said, “they got Nicole Kidman who brought in director Mimi Cave.”
Sodroski was pleased with the finished film. “It is very, very close to the first draft. The visual world is close. It was like a mind meld with Mimi Cave.”He admitted it can be hard to hand the screenplay over to a director. “They take control,” adding that movies are “always a collaboration with the director, writer, studio, and cast.”
In the end, he said, “You do think about the audience and what experience you want them to have. You’re building a roller coaster and what kind of ride you’re going to give them.”
“Holland” can be seen on Amazon Prime starting March 27.
Graham Corrigan
Carol Jimenez, left, and Alexa North explain their roles on the marketing team for Stissing Mountain High School’s racecar build team at a car show at the high school on Saturday, May 9.
PINE PLAINS — High school students showed off their engineering skills Saturday, May 9, showcasing a Mark 5 Shelby Cobra they built over the course of the school year.
The car was the end product of Pine Plains High School students’ participation in the Winner’s Circle Project. It’s the school’s first time as part of the yearly project, which began in 2019 as a way for high schoolers to get hands-on experience in STEM.
A shipment of parts and a fiber glass body was delivered to the school in September. Since then, a team of 25 students helped to build the car under the supervision of Jim Benincasa, a former math teacher at the school. A total of 17 of them are responsible for the build, while eight others handle marketing and graphic design under the direction of humanities teacher Jennifer Blackburn.
“I thought there was no way we would do this kind of program,” Benincasa said. “And a week later the principal came and said, ‘Do you want to do this?’”
Over the course of the class, the students had the opportunity to tour some professional racing labs: Factory Five in Massachusetts — which manufactures build-it-yourself component car kits — and Dyson Racing Team’s headquarters in Poughkeepsie among them.
“It helped me think about what I want to do in the future,” said Eben Dedrick, one of the participating students. “Now, I want to go into mechanical engineering. I worked on getting the pedals adjusted, and tuning the car — getting the wheels in the right spot.”
“A lot of classes in our school aren’t very hands-on,” said Alexa North, a student who worked on the marketing side. “This felt a lot closer to what I’m actually going to do.”
Her fellow marketer Carol Jiminez agrees. “When we tell people about it, everyone says, ‘I wish I had a class like that in high school.”
Local businesses got in on the act, too. Pine Plains Auto Body visited the school to help out with the car’s body work. Wheels of Time, a local vintage restoration auto company, lent a hand with the interiors. “I was blown away by the support,” Benincasa said. “And the kids are really into it too.”
The rubber meets the road next week: on May 19, Stissing High’s Cobra will travel to Lime Rock, where a professional driver will take the car through its paces. A few days later on May 22, the Cobra will compete against six other area schools participating in the Winner’s Circle Project. The cars will be judged by Dyson Racing pros in performance, marketing, and overall design.
Nathan Miller
Crews finish renovations at Veterans Park by spraying dirt off the new pavers and sidewalk in downtown Millerton on Thursday, May 7.
MILLERTON — Landscaping crews put the finishing touches on upgrades to Veterans Park in downtown Millerton on Thursday, May 7.
Workers had removed the temporary fencing and were spraying dirt off the brand new pavement Thursday afternoon. Scape-Tech Landscaping Technologies began the work on Monday, April 20, and predicted the work would be completed within two to three weeks.
Millerton Mayor Jenn Najdek praised the work, saying Scape-Tech's crews previously renovated Millerton's sidewalks.
"They're fast, efficient and easy to work with," Najdek said.
Renovations to the park included new brick pavers, replacement of a portion of sidewalk through the park, and replacing asphalt paving. Crews also power-washed the stone walls in the park.
Najdek said the work is mostly complete. The park now just needs grass to grow to finish its revitalization.
Funding for the renovations came from a combination of grants and cash reserves that the village maintains, meaning the village did not have to take on additional debt for the project.
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Millerton News
Liane McGhee, a woman defined by her strength of will, generosity, and unwavering devotion to her family, passed away leaving a legacy of love and cherished memories.
Born Liane Victoria Conklin on May 27, 1957, in Sharon, CT, she grew up on Fish Street in Millerton, a place that remained close to her heart throughout her life. A proud graduate of the Webutuck High School Class of 1975, Liane soon began the most significant chapter of her life when she married Bill McGhee on August 7, 1976. Together, they built a life centered on family and shared values.
Liane was a woman of many passions. She found peace in the outdoors, whether she was taking scenic country rides, fishing, or walking her dog. An avid reader and a talented painter, she possessed a creative spirit and a caring heart that extended to all animals. Above all, Liane was most at home when surrounded by her family.
Liane is survived by her devoted husband of nearly 50 years, Bill McGhee. Her legacy continues through her three children: Joshua (Tanya) McGhee, Justin McGhee, and Jaclyn (Joe) Perusse. She was the proud grandmother of Connor, Calia, and Kennedy McGhee, as well as Lillian and Tillman Perusse. She is also survived by her siblings, Larry Conklin and Linda Holst-Grubbe. Liane was predeceased by her parents Martin and Lillian Conklin, and her brother, Robert “Bob” Conklin.
In keeping with Liane’s generous nature, the family requests that, in lieu of flowers, memorial donations be made to Hudson Valley Hospice (by mail to 374 Violet Ave, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 or online at https://www.hvhospice.org/donate) or to the Millerton Fire Company at PO Box 733, Millerton, NY 12546.
A celebration of life will be held on Friday, May 8, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. at Conklin Funeral Home, 37 Park Avenue, Millerton, NY.
Her family will remember her as the strong-willed and caring matriarch who always put them first. She will be deeply missed.
Natalia Zukerman
In “Your Friends and Neighbors,” Lena Hall’s character is also a musician.
At a certain point you stop asking who people want you to be and start figuring out who you already are.
— Lena Hall
There is a moment in conversation with actress and musician Lena Hall when the question of identity lands with unusual force.
“Well,” she said, pausing to consider it, “who am I really?”
Born Celina Consuela Gabriella Carvajal into a San Francisco family steeped in performance — her father a choreographer, her mother a prima ballerina — Hall was, by her own account, “born to be onstage.”
“Like a show pony,” she joked.
She trained first as a ballet dancer, studying in France on scholarship before abandoning that path for musical theater after seeing her sister perform in “42nd Street.”
Even then, identity was something inherited before it was chosen.
The Tony Award-winning, Grammy-nominated performer has spent much of her career moving between worlds: Broadway and television, rock clubs and film sets, musical theater precision and raw, unvarnished songwriting. Her latest solo album, “Lullabies for the End of the World,” is an intimate, autobiographical work that explores co-dependency, heartbreak and self-reckoning.
But for Hall, whose career includes a Tony-winning turn in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” a starring role on Apple TV+’s “Your Friends and Neighbors,” and acclaimed performances in film and television, the search for artistic identity has been unfolding for decades.
The record’s central themes — identity, authenticity, reinvention — are the same ones Hall has been sorting through for much of her adult life.
“It wasn’t until later that I started asking those questions,” she said from New York City, which she splits her time between and West Cornwall, Connecticut. “What do I want to represent? Who do I want to be? I was trying to find the authentic self instead of just going with the flow.”
The search began, in part, with an unlikely catalyst: a tonsillectomy.
When Hall was 26, surgery altered her voice just as she had joined the rock band The Deafening. “They would just play really loud and never change the key,” she said, laughing.
At the same time, Hall found herself confronting larger questions about purpose and artistic direction.
“I was going through that moment of, what do I really want out of this industry?” she said. “If I’m going to keep doing this, I need to have a purpose.”
Until then, Hall said, she had largely been defined by external expectations.
“I was always who I was told to be,” she said.
The surgery became a kind of reset, both vocally and personally. It also coincided with another form of reinvention: the decision to change her professional name.
“My real name is a lot,” she said.
People stumbled over its pronunciation. It was harder to remember, harder to place. “Lena Hall” felt streamlined, memorable. “It also just sounds like a rock star,” she laughed.
Hall, who is one-quarter Filipino with Spanish and Swedish ancestry, later grappled with whether changing her name obscured an important part of who she is. At one point, she said, she was advised that reverting to her birth name might improve her casting prospects as representation standards shifted.
She declined.
“That didn’t feel authentic,” she said.
Instead, Hall came to see the name change as less a departure than a continuation.
After making the change, she discovered that Carvajal itself was a family alteration, adopted generations ago in the Philippines.
“I’m still honoring my family, even in the name change,” she said. “I’m continuing that tradition.”
Her Filipino heritage remains central to how she understands herself, even as some parts of that history remain difficult to trace.
“I’m very curious to keep searching,” Hall said. “That side of my family is where all the artistry came from.”
Hall’s refusal to flatten herself into a single story or cultural identity is mirrored in her journey as a multi-hyphenate artist. She is, depending on the moment, a Broadway belter, a screen actor, a rock frontwoman, a conceptual songwriter.
Her current side project, the all-female Radiohead tribute band Labiahead, gleefully complicates the picture further, reframing familiar songs through a new lens.
“When women perform something written and performed by men, it changes it completely,” she said. “Nothing even needs to be said. It just happens.”
The same could be said of Hall’s own work.
Across mediums, she is an artist interested less in performance as display than performance as revelation.
Onscreen, she said, that often means doing less.
“The camera is literally on your nose,” she said. “You just have to think, and it picks it up.”
Between Celina Carvajal and Lena Hall, between ballet and rock, Broadway and Cornwall, Hall is making peace with multiplicity.
“At a certain point,” she said, “you stop asking who people want you to be and start figuring out who you already are.”
Matthew Kreta
New Sharon Playhouse logo designed by Christina D’Angelo.
The Sharon Playhouse has unveiled a new brand identity for its 2026 season, reimagining its logo around the silhouette of the historic barn that has long defined the theater.
Sharon Playhouse leadership — Carl Andress, Megan Flanagan and Michael Baldwin — revealed the new logo and website ahead of the 2026 season. The change reflects leadership’s desire to embrace both the Playhouse’s history and future, capturing its nostalgia while reinventing its image.
After attending the closing performance of the Playhouse’s production of The Mousetrap last September, Christina D’Angelo told Playhouse leadership she was “completely changing her design direction” for the new logo after experiencing the work and atmosphere of the Sharon Playhouse firsthand. She incorporated the barn silhouette to capture the theater campus’s history and evoke the warmth and magic of the Playhouse.
“The barn gives a fixed image of how we all feel about the Playhouse,” said Megan Flanagan, managing director. “The new branding presents the story of the great history of Sharon Playhouse — who we were, who we are today, who we are becoming — and the barn is that unifying element.”
The design was one of several options presented and was selected unanimously by Playhouse leadership. D’Angelo also designed this season’s branding, creating a visual throughline for the 2026 season.
The Playhouse remains committed to its taglines and mission statements, “Create. Community. Together.” and “Your destination for the arts.” While those phrases are no longer reflected in the logo itself, Carl Andress, artistic director, said the organization is not moving away from them and that they will continue to appear in publications and on the updated website.
“The refreshed brand aims to shift the narrative in the community, reinforcing the Playhouse’s role not only as a theater but as a vibrant gathering place and artistic home,” Playhouse leadership said in a press release.
For more information, including a video about the updated logo and details on the upcoming 2026 season, visit sharonplayhouse.org
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