Welcome to this site dedicated to:

The Meadow Amphitheatre 

in 

Southampton's 

Tamanend Park

Foundations

• The Meadow Amphitheatre was established in 2008.  It was a result of my having faced the reality that I am living in Southampton and there was no stage facility which I felt could serve the kind of outdoor theatre I was wanting to develop. 

• Tamanend Park has another stage facility The Lion's Grove stage which is a nice stage area for certain kinds of events, concerts and such. It was my feeling that there needed to be another more isolated stage to present more intimate drama and music, which would not be effected by highway traffic.

• So, since I had a stage, which I used in my set design work when I was a Technical Director/Set & Lighting Designer, I determined that the best use this stage might be for an outdoor amphitheater.  The stage was not in use because I had determined that I was no longer going to pursue that line of work, in lieu of working in Producing/Directing/Writing.

• Hence, having worked for Joe Papp with Shakespeare in Central Park in NYC, I thought that we might be able to develop a program of that nature in Southampton. So it is that I approached the Director of the Park in Southampton.

• The rest is history, that you can read about on The Shakespearean Journal or Cinema Under the Stars Web sites.

Conclusions

• There are numerous staging and theatrical opportunities that have developed at the Meadow Amphitheatre, but all of the future at this facility will depend on much more community involvement.

• I will continue to maintain the basic potential here and strive to reconstruct the stage from more durable materials, but the programing at this facility will depend on more people being involved in hands on work, fund raising, and promoting the facility/programs.

• I intend on producing events here, but but I do not expect them to occur with any regularity, unless a great deal more assistance (in the way outline above) becomes consistently available. 

• Up until this time I was willing to bear the load for developing, constructing, supplying and maintaining this facility, but now I have other priorities, which I intend on assigning my resources to.

• I will continue to post here and will provide an outline of the goals and methods of reaching those goals, but I will not aggressively seek to fulfill those goals without seeing significantly more community involvement and resources being committed to seeing that happen.

• This means that - if we need to have a Board of Director, then we need to see people who are interested in sitting on the Board stepping up to the plate and offering themselves for that duty. 

• I am not willing to search out these people, because I need to see people with enough commitment to endure, people who are self-starters, who know how to get things done and have the right attitude.  I'm sorry to be blunt, but that's the way it is.

• I will not be the one to rally the community to that call, other than  posting here and continuing in my normal way of being.  If that is sufficient then it will succeed, if not, then so be it.

• I do hope that if you are a member of this community and - 1) you want to see the programs continue and 2) this stage facility be further refined for the benefit of the community; that you will get involved with hands on or financial assistance.
• We need significant financial support, not merely a few hundred dollars. It costs approximately $4,000 for the entire season of films to be presented with Cinema Under the Stars. Other programs are equally as costly.

• We made an attempt at free will contributions, and many thanks to those of you who did contribute, but it was simply not enough. This tells us that we need to have a more aggressive fund raising plan and people to implement that plan.  But I do not intend to be the one to implement that plan. I will contribute what I can to it, but I will not Direct the Funding effort.

• My interest, generally speaking, is in programming design and facilities development. The other duties of an operation need to be taken up by other people. It is as simple as that.

• I will offer as much assistance in this process as I can, without putting myself in financial jeopardy, as I have for the past three years.

Arthur Greisiger
Artistic Director / Proprietor;
Image of the Mind Studios

Founder / Administrating Director;
The Alpha & Omega Society

Founder / Executive Producer / Artistic Director;
The Shakespeareans of Tamanend Park