Olympic Theatre Arts’ fledgling Reader’s Theatre Club will perform two matinee shows of the children’s poetry book turned play “I Smile at the Sun: Verses for Children and Misidentified Grownups” at 2 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, April 12-13.

OTA will host the playwright, Judith Barrett Lawson, for a question and answer session after each performance and a book signing. Books and stickers and cards made with images by illustrator Netta Jones will be available for purchase.

Tickets are $15 for adults, $10 for students with a discount available for online purchases through olympictheatrearts.org: a free student ticket with a purchased adult ticket.

This is the second performance by members of the group, which meets on the first and third Thursdays of each month from 4-6 p.m., led by Cathy Dodd. They plan to have five or six productions a year.

There is room for more people to join. “Come and play with us,” Dodd said.

“It’s perfect for those of us getting to be a certain age” who may have memory troubles, she said, although all ages are welcome and have performed with them.

Actor Jim Bradrick said, “I don’t really like memorizing long parts anymore but I can still emote and ham it up on stage.”

Carl Honore, also one of the 12 actors performing the poems turned vignettes, said that he “came up with different voices and postures” for each of his six or seven readings. He said he is planning to wear the same hat in different ways for each.

Honore said the poems vary, with both humor and pathos present.

“I want to meet the author, because this is a very creative thing that she has done,” he said.

Reader’s Theatre, said Dodd, “is on a continuum,” from standing still and speaking without staging to movement and staging. This play, she said, will have movement and props.

Dodd said, “I Smile at the Sun” is a joyful experience.

She added that with all the worries and concerns people are experiencing right now, “it’s nice to go sit for a couple hours in a dark room with other people and laugh or smile or have a tear or two, and that’s okay. It makes us forget other things. It makes us feel human again.”

Special guests

Plays from the poems have been “workshopped” since 1992 in Southern California, where Lawson lived since leaving Eastern Washington to earn a double major in drama and English at Pepperdine University in Southern Calif., afterwards going on to a career in the entertainment industry, first in casting and then primarily in lyric and screenwriting.

Lawson said that although she wrote “I Smile at the Sun” in the late ’80s, “I know how to make things rhyme but not how to get things published,” so the book remained unpublished until a chance dinner party meeting with a publisher right after her house burned down in the the 2018 Woolsey Fire, subsequently leading to the 2023 publication of the book.

The fire also led to Lawson returning to Eastern Washington.

Lawson said that last year she decided to “get serious” about putting the book into play form and had just finished in the autumn when Cathy Dodd reached out to her.

Dodd said that she and Lawson’s sister, Deborah Gray, were friends in grade school. Gray sent Dodd the book and Dodd loved it and brought the play to the OTA Reader’s Theatre to try it out for performing where it was embraced by the actors.

Lawson said that the performance at OTA will be the first time it is performed by a cast of “over 60’s actors,” having been performed by people in their 20’s and children previously.

“You don’t have to be a kid” to appreciate the poetry, she said. “Some of it’s funny and fun, some of it’s poignant. I didn’t dumb it down to write it for kids.…” She explained that there’s something to be discovered in the rhymes for any age.

“For the grown-ups, it lets them experience the wonder of childhood,” said Lawson.

“My dad died at 85 and he never lost his wonder from childhood,” she said. “My grandma was like that, too.” Lawson described her grandmother sleeping on the ground under the stars with the children.

After their example, “I was determined to never lose the wonderment of childhood.”

Lawson learned to play the piano as she grew up and when she had the autonomy switched to playing the drums, so the percussionist’s sense of rhythm is present her writing. Lawson said that every beat is carefully planned out with the words and meaning; she puts a lot of thought and practice into her lines before committing to them.

Only one word was added when preparing the book for publication, because readers interpreted the rhythm of that line differently than she did.

Lawson said “The Sneetches” by Dr. Seuss was a favorite book growing up, especially ‘Too Many Daves.”

Shel Silverstein “is a big influence on me … I love how he used words and his rhymes and rhythms and how at the end there is a twist.” She said she includes a twist in her own poetry, too.

Lawson said that her “second mother,” Sue Lawson, went to college with her aunt in Walla Walla for theater and education and because of them she grew up going to plays and performing in plays.

“It oozes its way into you without you knowing it,” said Lawson. “There’s something about theater that’s just so lovely, with that immediate response you get from people.”

Lawson said that she expects Sue and Gray to come with her and is looking forward to seeing Sequim for the first time.

Photo courtesy of Judith Barrett Lawson/ Writer Judith Barrett Lawson will be in attendance next weekend for the OTA’s Reader’s Theatre Club’s performance of her play “I Smile at the Sun,” from her book of poetry for “children and misidentified adults” next weekend at OTA. Lawson said she purposefully retained her sense of childlike wonder through life from the examples of her father and grandmother and that her second mother’s deep involvement with the theater community in Wenatchee was an inspiration for her life as a screenwriter and other creative roles in Los Angeles and Eastern Washington.