NEW HAVEN - Using Long Wharf Theatre's world premiere production of Let Me Down Easy as inspiration, a group of local artists are crafting their own unique takes on the play's exploration of issues surrounding the human body.

Let Me Down Easy, written and performed by Anna Deavere Smith, directed by Stephen Wadsworth, will be performed on Long Wharf Theatre Mainstage from Jan. 9 - Feb. 3.

Artspace gallery, located at 50 Orange Street, New Haven, is hosting an exhibition based on the play through Jan. 19.

Known to Long Wharf Theatre audiences as the creator of Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles, Anna Deavere Smith's newest one-woman show - inspired by interviews conducted as a visiting professor at the Yale University School of Medicine - explores the resiliency and vulnerability of the human body.

"The exhibit features four outstanding New Haven area artists who strive to transform and recontextualize experiences relating to physical, emotional, and psychological struggle," said Laurel Coniglio, program director and Public Allies Fellow at Artspace. "Each artist's work explores the resilience and fragility of the human body."

Two of the paintings, "Geologics of Life #1" and "Body of Water" will be on display at Long Wharf Theatre through the run of the play.

Artist Anne Doris Eisner, the creator of those two works, explores how transformation and regeneration occur in nature, serving as a metaphor for human experience.

With acute awareness of the inner processes of the earth, her forceful mark-making depicts the irreversible changes wrought traveling through life.

Using unique geological formations and forms in nature, Doris Eisner draw parallels between the human experience and the natural world. Resilience, defiance, reverence are all symbolically represented in her work, Coniglio said.

"For five years now I have sought through my art to express the divine power and mysterious force of life," Doris Eisner said. "That which should have been destroyed instead is able to transform and rebuild, albeit into something new.

"Having faced the death of my child, I liken my survival to that of a tree struck by lightening which still puts out new branches. The water which cuts through mountains and finds its way to continue moving forward. I, too, continue to find a way to live on, though irreversibly changed."

In support of the exhibit, there will be an artist talk at Artspace at 6 pm on Thursday, Jan. 10.

Gallery Hours for Let Me Down Easy, as well as Artspace's concurrent exhibitions, are Tuesday noon to 5 p.m.; Wednesday through Saturday, noon - 8 p.m.

At Long Wharf Theatre, curtain times are Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 3 p.m. and 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets are $31.25-$61.25.

ANNE DORIS EISNER is an art educator at Amity Senior High School and has participated in many group shows and residencies, such as the Vermont Studio Center and the Atlin Art Centre in British Colombia.

TRACY WALTER FERRY is a former registered nurse turned artist and teacher. She received her MFA in painting from Hartford Art School in 2007, a BS from Georgetown University, and attended the Graduate Liberal Studies program at Wesleyan University.

Ms. Ferry's current body of work strives to demystify the body's organs and tissues, interior vessels she shapes into assemblages crafted of catheters, tubing, and hot water bottles. She lives and works in Cheshire, CT and Monmouth, NJ.

EVIE LINDEMANN is a printmaker and professor of Art Therapy at Albertus Magnus College with over 30 years experience in health and human service related professions. She received a BA in art from UC Berkeley and a MA in Counseling Psychology from John F. Kennedy University, Berkeley.

Her current print work expresses a struggle as a result of a traumatic hand injury. Her subsequent print work has served as a "soothing balm", helping reconstruct herself physically, psychologically, and emotionally. She is a member of West Cove Studios in West Haven, CT.

DAVID TAYLOR's work is an embodiment of his obsessions, in which he traces and probes possibilities created through his artistic process, making personal realizations along the way.

His credo is "no ideas but in things." Mr. Taylor received his MFA from Hartford Art School in 1995 and has been the subject of numerous solo and group shows around Connecticut. He maintains a studio in New Haven's Erector Square studio complex.