Pontine brings original production to Portsmouth

Adults are not so different from children. Children make sense of the world based on the stories they are told, which is why they believe in good guys and bad guys, happily-ever-afters and flying reindeer. Likewise, grownups understand the world through the dominant stories that narrate the adult world, which are subtly repeated to them by other adults. Together, stories we hear from others and tell about ourselves shape our reality. Why, then, have people not shaped a more perfect reality?

“The stories told the loudest in our culture—about personal worth and power and beauty and eroticism and goodness and wealth and so many other things—are not adequate,” says Kimberly Dark, a performer and storyteller coming to the Seacoast for a three-day run at Pontine Theatre in Portsmouth. “We need more stories,” Dark says, a task she is taking up by sharing her personal life stories with audiences in theater seats and university halls across North America and Europe.

Dark is a multi-dimensional performer who challenges audience members’ concepts of sex, gender roles, poverty, privilege, parenting and education with humor and passionate poetry. Much more than a night of passive entertainment, Dark’s “stand-up story-telling” provokes laughter, reflection and audience engagement.

Though she tours for about seven months of the year, Dark also takes the role of parent and professor of sociology at Cal State San Marcos and the University of Hawaii. 

When she makes her Portsmouth debut on Friday, Jan. 30, Dark will perform her original production “Stripped & Teased: Scandalous Stories with Subversive Subplots!” The performance is themed around sexuality, body image, the social construction of gender and the economics of being female.
Greg Gathers, co-artistic director at Pontine, believes Dark is a perfect fit with the theater’s mission and with Pontine audiences.

“We always present people who write their own material, and she is all original,” Gathers says. “Also, we are interested in presenting a range of stories and acts outside of the typical American drama.”

Gathers says that although Pontine has hosted countless non-traditional solo performances, “(Dark) is also edgy with overt political and social content,” a quality Gathers believes area audiences will appreciate.

On her Web site (www.kimberlydark.com) Dark describes her work as “artistic activism.”

“I tell stories about my life in order to illuminate the stories which form our culture—the stories by which we organize ourselves, often without really knowing it,” she says.

Dark’s performance on Friday, Jan. 30, begins at 8 p.m. at West End Studio Theatre, 959 Islington St., Portsmouth. Subsequent shows are on Saturday, Jan. 31 at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.; and Sunday, Feb. 1 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 to $25 and can be purchased online at www.pontine.org. For more information, call 603-436-6660 or contact This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Dark will also appear as a featured reader at the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program’s next poetry hoot on Wednesday, Feb. 4, at Café Espresso in 800 Islington Plaza, Portsmouth. The event starts at 7 p.m. with a poetry open mic to follow. For more information, visit www.pplp.org.