In cooperation with Garner Correctional Institution, the next Newtown Arts Festival event will be a reading of Menace by Marquise, an inmate at Garner CI.

The presentation will be Wednesday, September 30, at 7 pm, in the lower level of Town Hall South, at 3 Main Street.

Admission is free, but seating is limited. Reservations are required and can be made at newtownartsfestival.com/events. 

Menace updates and reinterprets the 1962 Sidney Poitier film Pressure Point, in which a prison psychiatrist risks his career to help a dangerously disturbed young man.  In the 1962 film, a prison psychiatrist is assigned the unpleasant task of helping a paranoid American Nazi charged with sedition.

In Marquise’s Menace, a psychiatrist treats a young man in a reform school. The doctor and the three prison staff members take part in a negotiation about the young man’s possible release.

The play is being directed by Beth Young.

This is the final event in the 2015 Newtown Arts festival, a month long celebration of the arts that included last weekend’s two-day outdoor event at Fairfield Hills.