Their venues are unusual, their aesthetics unorthodox, aimed at upending conventional theater practice. And the shows these two companies open this week and next tell us as much about the theaters themselves as they do about the human dramas they depict.
This weekend, the August Company performs a collection of short pieces adapted from non-dramatic literature, from novels to pop songs to the Internet. In June, Pauline Productions presents a farcical parody of living-history museums, performed on the grounds of a real historical museum.
Mayflower Plantation imagines a reenactment museum along the lines of Plimoth Plantation and Old Sturbridge Village—an open-air historical site where “interpreters” impersonate residents of the long-ago community, down to feigning ignorance of a visitor’s camera and shock at seeing bare legs in shorts. The Mayflower faux-village is staffed by a wildly dysfunctional collection of misfits, including an interpreter whose Puritan bonnet can’t hide her Southern drawl, another whose obsession with “accuracy” leads him to violence, and a very white student newly hired to be the museum’s sole Native American.
The play is the fanciful but pointed brainchild of Lisha Brooks and Dan Robert, recent graduates of the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School, now studying drama at Emerson College in Boston. Jeannine Haas, Pauline Productions’ founder and artistic director, saw a student production of the play a year ago at PVPA, and knew she wanted to produce it.
“People were falling out of their seats laughing,” she reports. “It has a fresh, new kind of youthful sense of humor to it, and yet it’s also compassionate.”
The shamelessly un-PC plot, unfolding in the cascading crises of a soap opera, hinges on a pending lawsuit against the museum and the conflicts surrounding the site’s shoddy approach to historical authenticity. Despite its comic slant, the co-authors say the play arose from serious concerns and personal experiences.
“Dan and I have a mutual love of Plimoth Plantation,” Lisha Brooks says. “But we used to joke about how funny it would be to work there for a while, and then on the last day completely break all the rules, like bring iPods and gossip magazines and tell people really inaccurate things. We also thought the way they treated the Pilgrim and Native American reenactment sites was highly bizarre. The Pilgrims are actors but the Native Americans are Native Americans, it’s their culture, and the way it’s presented is very awkward.”
While still at PVPA, the two took a class at Mount Holyoke College with history professor Lynda Morgan, who discussed the idea that in the aftermath of historic conflicts, the winners are the ones who get to tell the story, and it’s inevitably skewed. “It’s shocking sometimes, the way that history is taught to children,” Dan Robert says. “And it is funny in some ways. We have to laugh at the instability of some adults who try to own history.”
But he wasn’t laughing, he says, when as a third-grader visiting a nearby living museum with his class, he was forced to stand in a painful position as an example of old-fashioned schoolhouse discipline, and a classmate was driven to tears by having her hands pressed under a pile of books as a penalty for fidgeting. He says some of the inspiration for the script came from the fact that some museums have faced actual lawsuits for going too far in recreating authentic history, for example, by chaining children together in a simulated slave experience.
Mayflower Plantation is the sixth show mounted by Pauline Productions, founded four years ago with the explicit goal of creating more on- and off-stage roles for women. Previous productions have included women-centered plays like Doubt, Boston Marriage and the recent runaway hit Parallel Lives. This one, the company’s largest formal production to date, has a cast of 12 women and men, most of them experienced local actors, including two Equity professionals.
The play is being staged outdoors at Historic Northampton, a museum of local history housed in three 18th-century buildings on a land tract laid out in 1654. It’s not a living history museum, though it does boast a genuine blacksmith, Ted Hinman, who works in the barn that serves as the backdrop for the play.
Jeannine Haas, who is directing as well as producing the play, says, “One of the things that Pauline Productions really likes to do is to enliven spaces that haven’t been used as theaters before, to ignite and warm them up. This setting is great, because it looks just like a set we might have wanted to build, and it’s already here.”
Historic Northampton, which is known for its conscientious accuracy, “makes a fun juxtaposition with the Mayflower Plantation. And the fact that we’re performing on grounds that are all about history is fitting.” The museum’s director, Kerry Buckley, “just loved the idea of having a play here that will enliven the space,” she says. They also hope it will introduce the museum to people who are still unaware of this precious time capsule just a few steps away from downtown Northampton.
Shared Sensibility
The August Company, too, is performing in a non-traditional space: the North Star self-directed learning center for teens, an antique schoolhouse in Hadley, where PVPA was first housed (see StageStruck in this issue). The former classroom is still lined with blackboards, one of which figures in one of the pieces that make up Gone: A Play On Words.
It’s the first installment of what the company projects as an occasional series—called OnWord, itself a play on words—of performances based on the implications of a single word. This one explores “gone,” defined here as “a longing for what is absent and a wondering if anything is really ever gone.”
The 11 brief pieces in Gone are original dramatizations of works not written for the stage. They include a poignant episode from Outwitting History, about Yiddish Book Center founder Aaron Lansky’s mission to keep a dying language and literature alive; a mother’s account of her young daughter’s first lesson in death; a series of funny and sad posts to the online forum missingpersons.com; an extract from Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel of stifled passion, Remains of the Day; ‘N Sync’s hit song “Gone,” set in a cry-in-your-beer bar; and a chili recipe that becomes an elegy for the deceased wife who used to make it.
The ensemble of a dozen local artists (there are also a couple of guest performers in Gone) initially formed in the summer of 2007, after a production of King Lear at the Hampshire Shakespeare Company directed by Sheila Siragusa. The impetus came not only from the wish to continue a fruitful experience, but from the desire of several cast members to create a stable ensemble. “Usually it’s six weeks—bang, you’re in rehearsal, then performance, and bang, it’s over,” Siragusa says. Beginning that August (thus the group’s name) and continuing for almost two years, “We met ad nauseam, just trying to figure how to start a company, how to keep the tempo exciting us.”
Group member Kelsey Flynn adds, “I think taking that time was really helpful for us to talk about what is the work that gets us really excited, and why do we want to be a company ourselves? It was an opportunity to find a common language around the projects we are interested in and to form organically as a social entity, as opposed to a bunch of individuals that come together for different projects.”
For this company, the creation process is part of the final product. The first August Company production (Gone is only the second) was The Taming of the Shrew, staged last summer in Look Park. It was preceded by months of training workshops in acting technique and text study, working toward clarity of language and specificity of action, “getting it as big as we can get it and keeping as real as we can get it,” as Flynn puts it.
The result is a close-knit ensemble whose members have what Sheila Siragusa calls a “shared sensibility. Basically, we’re all interested in work that has to do with the intersection of physical movement with story and language, where those two things get married.”
She’s also pleased by the intersection of a variety of skills and backgrounds in the group. Shrew was co-directed by three company members coming from different backgrounds: theater, improv and film. “It was torture while we were doing it,” she says, “but the three of us combined to make quite an interesting brain—much better than we could have been with only one viewpoint.”
While Gone has a single director, Liesel de Boor, input flows from each group member. Siragusa says, “I feel like there’s no inhibition about Kelsey saying, ‘You know what? That’s not funny,’ or me saying, ‘It’s not truthful enough.’ We’re all really informing each other, which is so cool—and so challenging.””
Gone: May 28-29, 7 and 9 p.m., North Star, 135 Russell St., Hadley, www.august-company.com.
Mayflower Plantation: June 3-6 and 10-13, Historic Northampton, 46 Bridge St., Northampton, (413) 268-3850, www.paulinelive.com.
