Brewster Ladies' Library presents Dreams from a Planet in Peril

Please join us for a screening of Dreams from a Planet in Peril, a spellbinding new one-hour film about planetary abuse and its underlying causes. The film’s characters, settings, and language change in the four different “dreams” within the film. Earth’s peril comes to life in a variety of engaging ways—as hyperbole, humor, satire, or melodrama and with all the variety, confusion, emotional range, and fragmentation of the dreamworld itself. Created by writer/director Lee Roscoe and filmmaker/producer Janet Murphy Robertson, the film was first released in October 2022 as individual film shorts, one of which premiered at New York’s prestigious Chelsea Film Festival and was a finalist in three categories at the Independent Shorts Festival in LA. Laura Kelley of Protect Our Cape Cod Aquifer (POCCA) will host a post-screening discussion of eco-solutions, and the film’s creators will answer questions.

More about the Film

In the first dream—Water Spirits Colloquy—two Greek demigods and a legendary Native American spirit meet to share their torment over the ravaging of Earth’s waters by humans and eventually conspire to exact revenge. In a fascinating mix of mythology and science, they interact amidst spectacular underwater and terrestrial imagery and in scenes of environmental destruction that build to a dramatic ending. In The Cage, an owl watches as three characters argue, with both stunning insight and staggering myopia, in a fast-paced mini class war that highlights societal conflicts impeding change. In Reprieve, an indigenous man in despair over the demise of his culture and the Earth is saved by the common decency of people he barely knows. The Warning brings the film to its conclusion as the nameless slumbering woman is propelled by her dreams into a cartoon world so outrageously destructive to the planet that she steps into the dream and attempts to stop the madness.

In addition to Roscoe, the cast includes nine other beloved Massachusetts-based actors: Tom Wolfson, Judith Partelow (courtesy of SAG), Rod Owens, Karen McPherson, Constance Wilkinson, Cleo Zani, Geof Newton, Olivia Thompson, and LeVane Harrington.

Dreams from a Planet in Peril is supported in part by grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (Towns of Brewster and Dennis).

Laura Littlefield Kelley was born and raised in East Dennis as the 11th generation Kelley. Raised on a sheep farm growing food and clothing, she created an Organic Land Design company called Littlefield Landscapes. Since 1992 she’s been educating the importance of incorporating native vegetation on land which helps feed local pollinators, and helps protect the natural fresh and salt waters we rely on here daily. For decades she has dedicated her time to writing, crafting local Home Rule Petitions, and Ordinances, writing articles in newspapers, doing radio shows and public speaking to help protect our natural resources on Cape Cod. She believes it’s all about the choices we make every given day, what products you purchase matters to the future of our resources - so choose wisely for you ARE shaping your community.

Janet Murphy Robertson is a former New York executive and management consultant and the founder and executive director of ArtistsAndMusicians.org, a firm that has put the spotlight on creative and socially conscious people and produced plays, films, and musical events since 2008. In 2021, she founded Shoestring Virtual Theater, which produces films using a mix of techniques and technologies native to theater, film, and TV. This includes both traditional and green-screen filming/recording, cartooning, sound effects, special effects, musical scores, virtual video and photographic backgrounds, and black-and-white, as well as color, styling. Her other films include the newly released Journeys in the Light, Democracy, Diversity, and Myth in the Wake of the Mayflower, produced with Zion Union Heritage Museum (Hyannis) and Icons of the Civil Rights Movement, based on Pamela Chatterton-Purdy and Rev. Dr. David A. Purdy’s landmark exhibition by this name.

Long-time journalist, award winning environmentalist and playwright, Lee Roscoe's plays have been seen and heard from New York's Living Theatre, to Provincetown and Boston. They include The Mooncusser's Tale, on WOMR-FM, Impossible? about a tyrannical take over of America, a regional online premiere at Eventide Theater which had 1,000 views; and Dreams from a Planet in Peril, a film created in collaboration with Janet Murphy Robertson. The Warning premiered at the Chelsea Film Festival NYC. She studied acting in NYC and worked off Broadway as an Equity actress, and in independent films, most notably for Norman Mailer. (See her piece in The Cinema of Norman Mailer, Bloomsbury Press). Some of Roscoe's plays have had support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She has appeared on Cape at such as WHAT and the Provincetown Theater -- and has been voted best performances, twice, by the Cape Cod Times. Roscoe is currently a correspondent for Artscope and Provincetown magazines. She is the author of Dreaming Monomoy's Past, Walking its Present, a look at interacting nature and history and the new book Wampanoag Art for the Ages, Traditional and Transitional.