Theater starts with the written word, comes to life in the voices of actors and endures in the memory of its audiences. Sometimes, as with Carl Sternheim’s The Underpants, written in 1910, it gets forgotten until someone rediscovers it, reimagines it and breathes life into it — as comedian Steve Martin did for The Underpants in 2002.     A German farce, The Underpants seems a comedic take on Ibsen’s The Doll House, which debuted 31 years earlier. The themes of...

These are six of 99 stops in Simarski and husband Guy Guthridge’s six-year voyage of Chesapeake discovery aboard Bright Pleiades. Other journeys appeared in Bay Weekly between 2007 and 2008 under the title Voyages of Discovery.   Pilgrimage to the Top of the Bay     Our trawler curved along the channel of the Susquehanna Flats toward the very top of the Bay. Bedazzled by ducks, I had long wanted to see the flats, a legendary waterfowl hunting ground whose depths once...

The brotherhood of Dickerson sailboats stretches far and wide.     Built on the Eastern Shore under three owners from 1946 to 1987, Dickersons became so beloved that afficionados compete in the Find a Lost Dickerson Sailboat contest to complete the registry of every Dickerson ever built.     So it’s big news that Polish Sailor Krystian Szypka plans to race one of the Chesapeake-built boats across the Atlantic in OSTAR 2013. The challenging single-handed...

I grew up in a bucolic part of northern Delaware near the Brandywine River Valley, dubbed Chateau Country for its lush countryside riddled with duPont estates, rolling hills and horse farms. Greenville is the town center, just down the road from Nemours and Hagley Museum, the estate and gunpowder mill that was the beginning of the duPont dynasty. My father’s family has been part of the community for many generations, though we plowed a different path than the duPonts. My great-grandfather...