SABRINA SEELIG

The outdoor stage at the new Riley Children’s Performing Arts Center will be dedicated to Sabrina. The dedication will take place on Monday, June 1, 2009 at 5:30 p.m., opening the annual Shakespeare play.

Please read the letter below;

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“My Life, My Love, My Theatre” - Reflection by Sabrina Seelig, age 12 while a Riley student.

Dear Friends and Family,

I am writing to ask for your support of a very special project honoring the memory of our dearly beloved Sabrina. The Riley School, where Sabrina and I attended middle school, is in the midst of a capital campaign to support the construction of a beautiful Children’s Performing Arts Center. We have the opportunity to name the outdoor stage Sabrina’s Stage, and I am hoping you will help me raise the funds to make this possible.

I cannot credit Riley with giving Sabrina Seelig a love of the theater or the arts. To say that Riley was responsible for the creative energy and joy that poured out of her would be a misrepresentation. She was one of those rare and invaluable people born knowing who they are and what they love, and go about manifesting it with absolute fearlessness. What I can say for Riley is that they gave her, and all of us lucky enough to have spent time there as a young person, the dignity and possibility of space.

When Sabrina and I decided that we wanted to put on our own play sans adult supervision or direction, Riley allowed is the round room in the library for six months of lunchtime rehearsals, then gave us the space and time to perform our play. The production remains a triumph in my memory not only for its theatrical quality (immense, I assure you) but also for the artistic independence and strength it awoke in all of us.

Not only did Riley give us the space and time in which to develop that play, it also taught us to believe in the importance and possibility of the arts. The fact that Riley had a beautiful photography studio, that it now has a pottery barn, that we were allowed to build tree houses at recess, that once a year we painted kites and flew them above the field, that we threw ourselves into a Shakespeare play every spring, is all testament to the respect Riley has always had for the arts, and even more importantly, the respect they have for their students as artists.

When I first set foot on the wide expanse of new cedar that will be the outdoor stage at the new Riley Children’s Performing Arts Center all I could think of was how much Sabrina would have loved it, how it would have filled her with such ideas and excitement. Indeed she would have relished the theater building as a whole and I have no doubt would have matched its beauty and warmth with an outpouring of her own creativity. To have such a space available to the entire Midcoast community is so important.

Thanks to the generosity of two donors, we have already raised $36,000, and are well on our way to meeting the goal of $50,000 for the stage. We also need $5000 for outdoor lights and $5000 for an outdoor sound system. Please help us in any amount you can so that we may dedicate the outdoor theater to this extraordinary young woman. To have her represented indeed such a beautiful theatrical space will be an enormous gift to all of us who were lucky enough to have known and loved her. In addition I can think of no greater spiritual presence than our dearest Sabrina to watch over and inspire the next generation of Riley theater artists.

The dedication of Sabrina’s Stage will take place on Monday, June 1, 2009 at 5:30 p.m. before the annual Shakespeare play.

With deep gratitude and love,

Caitlin FitzGerald

Dear Friend of Sabrina and Riley Graduate

***Biographical note;

After Riley, Sabrina founded her own theater company, Professional Young Actors of Maine (PYAM), which produced several plays each year in various Midcoast venues. In her junior year, she directed Camden Hills High School’s entry in the One Act Play competition, and in her senior year she inaugurated the new Black Box theater with Six Characters in Search of an Author. She traveled and worked and wrote for a year, then attended Hampshire College for two years, where she acted in plays at Amherst and Smith Colleges and started to work on her first novel. Another year of traveling and working and writing took her to eastern Europe, Central America, and South East Asia, then back to New York City, where she enrolled at Hunter College as a classics major. At the time of her death, she was a full time student, also working and writing for The Brooklyn Rail, a monthly arts newspaper, tutoring writing in Harlem to high school students, and at work on her second novel.

She is profoundly missed.

Your donation to Sabrina’s Stage will hopefully spark other young
artists, thespians and writers.