THEATER: Chester Theatre Company No Longer "Miniature"
Written by Chris Newbound
Photography by Josh Lee

CTC is twenty years old and is looking to do bigger and better things. Michelle Tattenbaum is listening attentively to a scene between Benjamin Pelteson and Heddy Lahmann, an actress who displays an uncanny resemblance to a young Helen Hunt. To Tattenbaum’s right sits Kate DeCoste, the production’s stage manager. The play is Dov and Ali, with Pelteson playing Dov and Lahmann his girlfriend under the direction of Tattenbaum.

“Good. Nice,” she says after they finish, nodding, thinking. Tattenbaum appears to be holding back, letting her actors try a scene a couple of different ways, miserly, for now, with her suggestions. Table-reading (when actors and the director sit around a table reading the script aloud for the first time) has officially begun—a theater professional’s spring training, as it were, when hope for the new season springs eternal.