Mead Winters
The Grove Street Theater, located at 130 Grove St. in Montclair, serves as home to Apricot Sky Productions.
Founded in 2000, Apricot Sky Productions is known for its low-priced, high-quality writing and talent. Featuring actors and directors from Nutley, Maplewood, Orange, and South Orange, they are celebrating 25 years in production.
Eric Alter, playwright and producer from Livingston, started Apricot Sky Productions in 2000 as a way to get people to come see his writing.
“It’s a blessing,” he said. “I am the head of the company, but at the same time I’m also the producer and doing a lot of stuff on my own. The creative control is great.”
Alter’s first show was in April of 2000; an evening of one-act plays. “It was very well received,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about theater back then. Somebody came to the show and said, ‘You have to take this show to New York City.’”
He ended up bringing the 60-minute piece about dating and relationships to the New York Comedy Club right before Sept 11, 2001.
“I thought maybe I could be decent at this,” he said.
It’s been a great journey for Alter. He wrote a TV pilot that is now on Tubi. He has something in the works for a feature film down the road. And his top goal is to go to a movie he has written.
Alter is mostly self-taught.
“I did take a couple playwriting classes in New Jersey,” Alter said. “The way I learned was reading other people’s scripts and going to people’s shows.”
As a kid, Alter was more into film, but what he’s grown to love about theater is that there’s a greater sense of community.
“Everybody works together,” he said. “Everybody succeeds. It’s live. You can’t do reshoots and retakes.”
Allen Roberts of Maplewood, Mead Winters of Nutley, Donna Fraissinet of Nutley, and John Fraissinet of Nutley have all worked at Apricot Sky over the years. They have strong, positive emotions about Apricot Sky—and theater in general.
Roberts played Dr. Winters in the play “Shrinks.”
“The theater’s a place where I can be myself—and others—with talented, often younger, fellow/sister actors and directors in a collaborative effort to entertain folks by bringing a playwright’s vision to life, or at least acting like I am,” Roberts said.
Mead Winters directed “1000 Dinners” for the company.
“Theater is a means of expressing a form of storytelling that enables people’s emotions and experiences to encompass a message that resonates to some degree to make us think about our own lives,” Winters said. “The play, ‘1000 Dinners’ is a beautiful story between a father and daughter and how the trials and tribulations of life bring us closer together when, despite our own challenges, we can look at the beauty in others knowing how much they have done for us so we can comfort them and continue to show them our unconditional love.”
Donna Fraissint directed “In Reverse Order.”
“Theater means collaboration, which means community, and that’s where the joy is,” Fraissint said.
John Fraissinet, Donna’s husband, directed “The Break-Up King.” He said, “Theater is not only a creative outlet it’s a way to meet others and work on shared goals in a unique way.”
As a place of collaboration, Alter says, “There are no small parts because each person is integral to every production. I am incredibly proud of everyone on this show; they make it all worthwhile.”
To learn more about Apricot Sky visit: https://apricotskyproductions.com/
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