by Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but can it ever do justice to the ghosts caught in the frame? Should we even care, as long as the resulting images entertain - and sell?

by Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; "A Thousand Words," Gwendolyn Rice's new play inspired by the great photographer Walker Evans, takes place in Kansas and New York, and involves Cuba. But the Madison playwright's Wisconsin work experiences raised crucial questions she pursues in the play.

WUWM's Bonnie North interviews A THOUSAND WORDS playwright Gwendolyn Rice!

Watch John McGivern's "Footlights Minute" interview with actress Molly Rhode!

by Jenna Kashou, Inside Milwaukee.com; Just as life can be unexpected, inspiration can also happen at serendipitous or seemingly irrelevant moments. Like reading a newspaper, for example. An article about a set of old photographs by a Depression-era photographer, propelled Madison-based playwright Gwen Rice into a research frenzy back in 2004.

Check out this new preview video for A THOUSAND WORDS featuring footage from the Madison production and interviews with director Jennifer Uphoff Gray and actors Georgina McKee & Molly Rhode. (Click more info to watch)

“There is no single work of art or literature that summarizes the deep concern with poverty in the 1930s. The work of documentary photographers like Walker Evans may come the closest, in part because the unvarnished humanity of their subjects seemed to transcend its historical moment.” ~Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, by Morris Dickstein

2004: Playwright Gwendolyn Rice stumbles upon “a newspaper account of when the photos were found amongst (Ernest) Hemingway’s possessions. I had never heard of Walker Evans, but the story really intrigued me.”

by Lindsay Christians, 77 Square; For Madison writer Gwendolyn Rice, there’s always one character in each of her plays with whom she’s a little infatuated. In “A Thousand Words,” that character is Walker Evans.

by Andrew Winistorfer, A.V. Club; In A Thousand Words, photographer Walker Evans accepts a government job documenting the lives of dustbowl farmers in 1930s Kansas. At the same time, he also accepts a partner: a reluctant writer named Shirley Hughes who will supply the narrative to accompany his images. Eighty years later, some of Evans's photos are discovered in the personal effects of another writer: Ernest Hemingway.