Kickstarter

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

May 7, 2012 marks the 200th anniversary of Romantic poet Robert Browning’s birth. Bay Area actor Julian Lopez-Morillas has honored the occasion with a solo show, SLEEP TO WAKE: ROBERT BROWNING REMEMBERS ELIZABETH, which has been presented in theatres in California and the Northeast and is now facing its greatest challenge.

We need to raise $15,000 to send our production team to Edinburgh for the first two weeks of August, feed and house them and mount the play at the Hill Street Theatre in Edinburgh’s beautiful 18th-century New Town. The Universal Arts Festival, our sponsor, is a veteran Fringe producer and has come to share our enthusiasm for the project. Hill Street Theatre is a major Fringe venue and a perfect fit for the story we have to tell.

Elizabeth Moulton Barrett and Robert Browning were both established poets in their thirties when they finally met in 1845, after a six months’ correspondence. The witty and passionate letters that daily passed between them-- before their elopement the following year-- are justly celebrated as the greatest series of love letters in our language.

SLEEP TO WAKE finds Robert at the cusp of 70, twenty years after Elizabeth’s death, reading from the letters that sparked the love of his life and reliving his earlier “Dramatic Monologues”-- character impersonations in verse that reveal the hidden lives of their speakers. The best-known poems include “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” “My Last Duchess” and the delightful “Pied Piper of Hamelin.”

Help us realize a life-long dream by sending this tribute to two much-loved poets to Edinburgh!