A Night of Theatrical Vignettes at The Darby Hotel for Deep Water Literary Fest

Founded in 2018, the Deep Water Literary Fest is back next summer, June 20th to 22nd, with another ambitious program of authors as well as a series of theater, visual art, and video. Deepwater Literary Fest is presenting Do Not Disturb this Friday, a holiday cocktail party benefit featuring vignettes set in the rooms of the Darby Hotel.

Here to tell us more is the founder of the Deepwater Literary Festival and host of Shelf Life right here on Radio Catskill Sundays at noon, Aaron Hicklin. Good morning, Aaron.

Aaron Hicklin: Good morning, Tim. How are you?

Tim Bruno: I’m good. It feels like winter out there, but it’s not too early to think about summer, it seems.

Aaron Hicklin: And unfortunately not. The the hamster wheel never stops turning. Yeah. Not not not in this town anyway.

Tim Bruno: Well, you’ve got a unique way of of, presenting a holiday cocktail party benefit here. This “Do Not Disturb” idea, I mentioned it’s featuring vignettes inside the rooms at the Darby Hotel. Tell us a little bit more about this, how it works, and how it kinda came about.

Aaron Hicklin: Well, first of all, we’re very lucky and grateful to have a hotel like The Darby on our doorstep. It wasn’t always the case, and it turns out to be a fine venue for all sorts of things. We hosted the festival opening night, actually not the opening night, the main festival party there last June for Deepwater 2024 and it’s a place where we’re able to house and accommodate many of our visiting authors. So we have a great relationship with the hotel, they’ve been very good to us And I’ve always loved the idea of using interesting and dynamic spaces in atypical ways. We’ve performed sort of piece of the theater in the Lutheran Church in Narrowsburg particularly seen involving a deceased visit to the underworld for example.

It’s kind of fun to sort of repurpose a space or something other than it was designed for. In this case, we want to use the rooms for things, they’re a little more playful, perhaps things that people do in rooms after dark, hence the the do not disturb title. Let’s just say some of these will involve pajamas. Some might might involve a hunt for a missing sock. I mean, who knows?

What what goes on in hotel rooms that you’ve been in, Tim?

Tim Bruno: Well, mainly, it’s a lot of passing out of exhaustion and going to sleep while watching television, but, that’s not very theatrical. I love this idea, though. There’s a there’s this, you know, this site specific sort of thing. There’s a bit of a dinner theater. There’s a bit of a haunted house.

You kind of happen upon these rooms and people, that you might recognize in there too. Tell us about some of the performers.

Aaron Hicklin: Yeah. Well, we have, our wonderful, actors, Dylan Baker and Becky Ann Baker, who live in our community in Sullivan Catskills. They have been supporters of the festival from day 1, have performed at many of the festivals. They’ll be doing creating a bedroom vignette that involves poetry and pajamas as I mentioned earlier. We have Flirty Riot which is a new outfit in town.

It was created by Susan Mendoza who runs the Chi Hive sort of burlesque performance troupe I would say, quite titillating a little naughty, they’ll be taking over one of the rooms. A more sort of avant garde performance by Willow Gatewood. Willow has done some incredible multimedia installations at the festival. And she’s doing something that will involve sort of audio visual experience when you enter into the room. And then we’ll have a little nod to that that classic hotel subject, the tortured writer trying to create a manuscript in a hotel room at night.

So there’s 4 brief vignettes. I want to say you know these aren’t like full fledged performances. These are really brief vignettes you pop into room, you might be in the midst of something, you might be at the tail end of it, you might be at the beginning, you can hang around and watch it through or you can just pop into the next room.

So it’s really a way to sort of make the fundraiser a little more eclectic and engaging than just popping up the bar.

Tim Bruno: Is it a self guided experience? You can go into each room as you please.

Aaron Hicklin: It is self guided over a period of about an hour. So they’ll they’ll run-in kind of cycles. If for any reason, the the performers so they need a break, they need to, you know, they they they they need a sort of mental break from being, from being, peeped at, there’ll be a do not disturb sign on the door so you’ll know not to go in.

Tim Bruno: And as I mentioned, this is a benefit for the Deep Water Literary Festival 2025. There’s also a silent auction with, artists and, other kinds of things for folks. Have you, landed on your theme yet for the Deep Water Literary Fest for 2025? You you always have a great overarching theme for the festival.

Aaron Hicklin: We have. And in a world exclusive, Tim, I can tell you that the theme for 2025 is “metamorphosis.” Not specifically Kafka’s metamorphosis or Ovid’s metamorphosis, but metamorphosis as a kind of literary conceit change, transformation, adaptation. So really kind of looking at how authors and artists engage with the idea of changing and transformation and also translation since literature and translation is such a big thing. It’s something we also want to explore at next year’s festival.

That’s a kind of transformation itself from one language to another. So it’s a very, it’s a very, gives us a lot of it gives us a lot of room to explore and and play with the theme. And I also think it kind of lends itself to lots of things that feel very pertinent right now. So one of those is the is the immigrant experience, for example. Immigrant writers, who’ve come from one country to another have also gone through a kind of transformation of metamorphosis.

So exploring those kind of very topical themes, something the festival is always keen to do, I think is uppermost in in our mind right now. That

Tim Bruno: feels very appropriate to what’s going on in the world and in some of our institutions and things like that. Let’s remind folks where they can get more information and tickets for the “Do Not Disturb” event on Friday night.

Aaron Hicklin: Yeah. You know, entrances by donation, you can just turn up on the night at the Derby Hotel, which is, just across the bridge in Narrowsburg. It’s very easy to get to. I mean, it’s technically Beach Lake, but it’s really Narrowsburg. And you can reserve in advance, we’ve got a recommended donation of $25 that gets you a drink ticket and a little swag bag or you can just pay what you want, what you can afford at the door.

There is a link on the One Grand Books Instagram and also on the Deepwater festival Instagram. So you can find that there. There is a link also from the deepwaterfestival.com page. It may not be that link may not quite be live yet. So go to Instagram first, or just turn up on the on the evening 7:30 to 10 at the Derby Hotel.

Tim Bruno: That’s Aaron Hicklin, the founder of the Deep Water Literary Fest, telling us about the “Do Not Disturb” holiday cocktail party benefit coming up on Friday. And don’t forget to listen to him on Sundays at Noon on “Shelf Life” right here on Radio Catskill. Aaron, thanks so much.

Aaron Hicklin: Thank you.

Image: Actors Dylan Baker and Becky Ann Baker, who will be performing theatrical vignettes at the “Do Not Disturb” event. (Credit: Joseph Marzullo/WENN)