“Gould and Stearns have long had at least three sides,” says the Gould half of that duo. They are consummate clowns and committed social activists, as well as having distinct individual careers. This weekend, Peter Gould and Stephen Stearns celebrate 30 years of a unique partnership with three days of performances at the institution Stearns founded, the New England Youth Theatre in Brattleboro.
They are the perfect odd couple, one a gregarious networker and impresario, the other quiet and introspective. Stearns’s NEYT has become an arts anchor for southern Vermont, bringing together not only children and youth in a multifaceted program, but providing a venue and focal point for numerous other groups. Gould is a novelist, essayist and playwright as well as performer. His sophisticated young adult novel Write Naked, about two misfit teenagers who discover each other and themselves through creative writing, won the Green Earth Book Award last year for raising awareness of environmental stewardship.
Both Gould and Stearns have deep roots in physical theater, clowning and mime. Their “funny work,” as Gould terms it, includes comic illusions, zany music and manic wordplay, with gags for the grownups layered into “the stuff the youngest kids can jump up and down about. It’s our give-everybody-a-good-time side, and if they learn a life lesson or two in the process, so much the better.”
The other side of the G&S mix is “our constant political theater work,” exemplified by two original shows on social issues. Secrets is a presentation for schoolchildren in which the pair discuss the disabilities—stuttering for Gould, and dyslexia and obesity for Stearns—that bedeviled their own childhoods. There are lessons in it about teasing and bullying, shame and rejection, and overcoming perceived handicaps.
A Peasant of El Salvador, created in the 1980s, tells the story of a poor family’s struggle for survival in the midst of the brutal civil war of that period. With wry humor and trenchant satire, it examines the devastating effect of political power struggles and economic predation on ordinary people and their livelihoods. The piece is still regularly performed, not only by the duo but by many ensembles around the world, drawn to its ever-timely themes. The bilingual text has been widely used as a teaching tool, and it inspired the creation of Rotary International’s Pure Water for the World campaign.
The weekend’s events include performances of A Peasant of El Salvador; the family show Fee Fie Fo Fun, a madcap retelling of “Jack and the Beanstalk”; a potpourri of the team’s physical comedy favorites, Still Clowning after Thirty Years (including their popular calypso number, “Vermont is a Third-World Country”) and an informal tell-all chat about life as performing artists, “True Triumphs and Disasters of Touring.”
Gould and Stearns 30th Anniversary Celebration: May 7-9, admission by donation, New England Youth Theatre, 100 Flat Street, Brattleboro, (802) 246-NEYT (6398), www.neyt.org.
