GreenStage and The Cove Center for Grieving Children Plan Theater Partnership

Camp Compassion is a weekend of fun camp activities and therapeutic activities that allow participants to process grief.

GreenStage and The Cove Center for Grieving Children are partnering to offer theater, storytelling and movement as part of The Cove’s 2025 Camp Compassion, an overnight bereavement support camp for children and teens ages 6 to 17. The camp will take place during the weekend of May 16-18 in Kent, Connecticut.

Camp Compassion is for youth who have experienced the death of someone significant in their lives. Children and teens join in a weekend of traditional, fun camp activities while also participating in therapeutic grief activities that allow them to process their loss and maintain a connection to their loved ones.

GreenStage, whose mission includes using the arts to inspire, empower and help heal communities of need, is providing a professional theater facilitator to lead workshops for teen mentors and camp participants. Marcella Trowbridge, co-founder and artistic director of the Middletown-based professional theater company ARTFARM, will work with both groups to help them unearth, process and express their emotions via the techniques of theater, storytelling and movement. Trowbridge is a longtime theater artist, justice of the peace, death doula, activist and community ritual-keeper whose work involves helping individuals and communities affected by trauma, grief and fragility process their losses, and to build strength and resilience.

Marcella Trowbridge of ARTFARM, left, working in Sri Lanka with young people who had experienced loss through civil war and tsunami.

“Many of us are uncomfortable with death and grief,” Trowbridge said, “and we are often under-resourced or ill-prepared when it comes to coping with them. As a child, experiencing the death of a loved one can seem overwhelming, and a grieving young person needs courageous adults who can sit in the fire with them while recognizing and nurturing ‘the kid’ in them. I feel privileged to be invited into this special community and to use the power of theater and expressive arts to be in service of the campers, to help them play, feel, grow, express, transform and build resilience.”

Allison Gamber, executive director of The Cove, said, "The Cove is thrilled to be partnering with GreenStage Guilford Live Arts for our annual Camp Compassion. At camp, we aim to offer community and connection to grieving children, teens, and their families. We do this through a combination of healing, clinician-led activities and joyful, exciting means of self-expression supported by trained bereavement volunteers. Performance is a vital pillar of the arts, and we are excited about this partnership, which is congruent with our mission to offer hope and healing to families in their time of greatest need. We are honored to collaborate with such an important local organization."

“We’re excited about this partnership with The Cove,” GreenStage Executive Director Peter Hawes said. “The arts are so much more than entertainment. They enable us to dig deep within ourselves; to find, explore and express ideas and emotions; to discover new voices within us and put them into the world in connection with others. It’s our hope that the success of this program will lead to further collaboration with this wonderful organization whose work is so essential today.”

Participation in Camp Compassion is free by application. Acceptance is based on a child’s readiness for camp, bereavement needs and participation in other grief services.

Founded in 1995 and based in Cheshire, The Cove provides family- and school-based programs utilizing the peer support group concept for helping children, teens and families work through unresolved grief due to the death of someone significant in their lives. For more information, visit covect.org/campcompassion or call 203-634-0500.

GreenStage is a Shoreline-based presenter of live arts programs that invigorate the community and introduce people to fresh perspectives on the world. Its signature event is a diverse, biennial performing arts festival centered on the Guilford Green, scheduled this year for August 10-17. Visit greenstageguilford.org or call 203-654-9482 for more information.

ARTFARM is a non-profit, professional theater organization dedicated to cultivating high-quality theater with a commitment to simple living, environmental sustainability and social justice. For more information, visit art-farm.org or call 860-346-4390.