Costumes, Characters, and Time

DATELINE:
Bethlehem, PA 1864
Bethlehem, PA 2012 Moravian College, Arena Theatre Area

Magic occurs in theatre when the audience is convinced to shed its reality for the reality of the players. Creating a bond and a shared world.

A faux reality, sure, but not necessarily frivolous. Social reality occurs when the greasepaint comes off and the audience returns to merge the concentrated reality of a couple of hours to to the real time and space. Has anything changed. Was there a point? Dunno. Is a journalist in residence job in a theater to pop balloons or help to blow them up? Let’s try both.

Years back in Paris, a friend and I, in conversation with a member of Comedie Francais, listened to a long description of an entire afternoon spent at the theatre deciding the proper placement of a chair upon the stage. It was like a detailed hunting story. Much richer for the raconteur than the listener. But rich non the less. Perhaps for its apparent luxury.

As my friend and I walked down Rue du Four toward Rue St. Sulpice, he asked: “Can you imagine… an entire afternoon to consider the placement of a chair? Is it valid? Can it matter? Can you imagine?”

“Of course, I can.” I replied. I’m in France to gather a few images amounting to a few hundredth of a second and a few pieces of film. Less words than a power point that will be edited further. And a magazine sent me. Its not the total number of words a writer writes or and actor speaks. But the few visual sentences that last. Its the ones gotten right. That work. Transforming even a little.

That’s the way the magic occurs. In bumps and grinds. For A RESTING PLACE we’ve watched the project conceptualized, the script written and critiqued, the concepts and direction added. At a certain point, the actors mostly know their lines, and it’s time to costume. Usually as the costumes go on and refine, the actors seem to find their vocal and physical voice. Where the chair get fixed in a place no one will trip over it. In a show like A RESTING PLACE, this is when the time machine takes over.

As our watches no longer work, how will we measure time? How does the dateline of a journal work? A RESTING PLACE concerns the American Civil War. During a blood bath of 600,000 casualties in an embryonic country of only four generations battled to independence within familial memory by a total force of perhaps 30,000. The size of tragedy shares proportion with inverse squares.

The Nine-Foot African Elephant

Early on: “I want to see the cast in character come across a bridge or down a street behind the elephant,” mused Doug Roysdon of Mock Turtle Marionettes as he sketched the frame work. “Then they become puppeteers.”

This says a lot about the dynamics of good puppetteering. The cast in character without the puppet would be grotesques and the puppet itself a peculiar nine foot thing that doesn’t move.

Like all good art, it first bounces off the retina, then it bounces off the brain and then the heart. And its ready to sing.

But first one has to build it.

The elephant has become a lynch pin. As Jp Jordan mentioned in the discussion of the formation of the script, the Pageant Wagon provided an aspect of spectacle. Originally the thought was to pull the wagon with horses. As Director Christopher Shorr and Artistic Director Jp Jordan walked Lehigh University locations, I mentioned that in my years of location work horses are a real mess in public space. Both physically and economically.

Since Dan Rice was famous for his elephant and the first to teach an elephant to walk a tight rope, was there any possibility of the elephant? JP immediately thought of Doug. “Doug can build anything.” He had done the large puppet work on Quixote.

The Cemeteries – “Fine and Private Places”

Cemeteries are not always particularly spiritual places. The more ornate they become the more they may demonstrate the futility of  our experience with death. We build decoration with opposable thumbs. Little else is within our powers.

Other than the cemeteries of mass tragedy: war battlefields, plague, natural and man-made calamity… modern cemeteries are not where people die. Not where the spirit leaves the body but, where the body itself comes to rest. Often accorded more respect and privacy than received when quick with soul and spirit.

In the early days of Touchstone’s Civil War/Cemetery Project, pre-funding or certainty, I walked the Bethlehem grave yards making these photographs as studies and demonstrations of our respect and good faith to the families and organizations that maintained them. Peter Beagle’s cemetery novel, A Fine and Private Place walked along, as well as Andrew Marvel’s poem from which it was taken. My twin notebooks from those days labeled: THE RESTING PLACE and A RESTING PLACE.

Each of the three cemeteries studied represented three separate faces of America. Its social and economic landscape progressing through the first century of America’s existence.

God’s Acre is the oldest. Smallest.  Most simple. Flat Moravian stones. The Acre’s grass carefully trimmed away from them. At the Peifer grave, Bill George and I discussed the personal hell Peifer had experienced, contrasting the peace of God’s Acre. The terms: “At Peace” and “At Rest” developed more significance.

God’s Acre is truly dedicated to a Moravian view of the peace of God’s simple order. My dad dropped me there school mornings at the Moravian School while he went on to teach in Nazareth another Moravian Community. We lived in yet another. The aesthetic is constant.

God’s Acre personally resonates with plain wooden seats, chapel hymns, and brick walks with squirrels accepting peanuts. Memories of names from the original Moravian community read again, unchanged generations later. In which small flags flapped over graves, held in badges bearing the mark of The Army of the Republic: the Union forces. Cemeteries’ ages can be judged by the war badges. The commemorations of its citizens wars. Gods Acre is small. Certainly filled before too many badges of the wars of our republic could accumulate.

God’s Acre was where A Resting Place began. Where members of the Touchstone Ensemble came to say words on Veterans Day before James Peifer’s grave, promising the good faith of their efforts. In late twilight we began.

The Pageant Wagon and a Big Caldron of Ideas Pushing

Today, a talk with Jp Jordan, Touchstone’s Artistic Director, about institutional memory, the ways of the world and how A Resting Place fits into all that.

…and how the Pageant Wagon finally rounds the bend. Behind a nine-foot elephant.

Jp begins discussing A Resting Place: “All of Touchstone leads to Catharsis.”

A Resting Place is a premium title. Looking at it from the physical… yes the graveyard is the resting place, that is the past, but further considering the primary divisions we see in the present, in today’s politics, the society still isn’t “at rest”. So it’s something to work with.

Also a good fit for us. The zen of the project… isn’t unique in the History of Touchstone’s community based theatre. Just sort of a next step. A celebration of people and freedom. Life. All of Touchstone leads to catharsis. And that’s how we free ourselves from certain parts of our past.

After doing Steelbound, Touchstone moved along to Quixote, learning from its experiences with the community. In that regard, A Resting Place matches up well, working with current issues before us. Again, the the role of catharsis. Working edges off “hot” button issues. War and race. Creating more common ground than before. Through theater.

Ms. Alison Carey: Playwright of A RESTING PLACE

Paths among the world’s small professional theater groups wind and intertwine with unpremeditated complicity. The reach is impressive. They watch each other when opportunities present through pilgrimage and conversation. Notes labeled: “later”  are jotted on small pieces of paper dropped in the desk drawer from which the hat tricks are pulled.

Bill George originally met Alison when her troop was performing in West Virginia. It was a journey, driving there with his son Sam simply to see the performance. Introductions, conversation and the general camaraderie of actors and carnies a long way from home built a beginning.

Perhaps the actors craft is a more precarious path than the road not taken.  As the road actually taken. John Wilkes Booth, P.T. Barnum, Josie Earp. Dan Rice. An adventure not for the timid.  But as I said: the demons and the angels fully noted, underlined, and folded. Carefully, labeled: “maybe some time” and everyone goes back to making what passes for a living in the world of brands, instant celebrities and “reality TV stars” exemplifying the old saw: “if you’re so dumb, why ain’t ya rich?”

Something happened years later. Pardon our French. Maestro Jacques Lecoq arrived – during the FESTIVAL OF CREATION, hosted by Touchstone and Lehigh University Theater– a massive celebration of his career and all the international movement theatre troops that it occasioned.

Lecoq regarded the detritus of the Bethlehem Steel works saying to Touchstone Ensemble members and former students at his Paris School, Mark McKenna & Jennie Gilrain (Mr. &Mrs.): “Something should be done there.”  Again noted to the Hat Trick drawer.

Bill remembered Alison and critical mass flirted from the ethers. Love bloomed into what would be Steelbound, the community based play about the end of the steel plant. Measuring community collaboration as success for community-based theater … Steelbound rang true.

So when the Civil War/Cemetery Project pecked its way out of its egg, old relationships beckoned. Old allegiances and alliances.

Its feet solidly beside the old, moving like dancers celebrating a solid performance by dancing at the cast party.

—-
H. Scott Heist
journalist in residence
Touchstone Theatre’s A RESTING PLACE

© h scott heist 12

Contributions are the work of H. Scott Heist, journalist in residence. Both photographs and copy are reserved. Use is by permission for the promotion and appreciation of the A RESTING PLACE project. All inquiries and comments are both invited and appreciated.

Battlefield / Dateline: Gettysburg

Dateline: Gettysburg 10.12.11

Very little could be more different. No one was shooting at us.

The air: warm and clear. Bright Autumn sun. Pigments changing in leaves, and silence, enough to hear breeze through the trees. We could see for miles.

The battle of Gettysburg was different. Fought in early July. Almost touching Independence Day. Typical Pennsylvania heat. Typical unbearable humidity

Summer haze and summer sun blotted away by black powder smoke from cannons, rifles, muskets, explosions. Screams of the dying countered by screams of the attacking.

An Interview with Bill George

Our journalist in residence, H. Scott Heist, and Touchstone’s co-founder Bill George have been good friends for several decades.  The following is an interview of Bill written by Scott about Touchstone’s history in creating community based works.

Well, it came out of a winter dinner with old friends. Then a lunch scheduled on one of those near winter days when the clouds caress the tops of the Bucks County corn shocks, each divided by spears of streaking yellow light. Bill George asked after my interest in a Touchstone project? The reply was:” yes but, I really should know what it was about.” And that’s how we got to the lunch in the little café. Like when we were kids.

Touchstone Theatre was 30 years old. Our kids now the age when we began to march.  Bill was back as director at Touchstone, the economy in a created crisis and well, myself just doing a long tour with the realities of an auto accident. So much for retiring to the Mediterranean sun to finish the unfinished Books.

After all the trekking all over the world, we were once again making plans in a small eatery on the Southside, of a former steel town. What remained the same was: the company was good. The change was we had learned a lot. Often the hard way. And it was time to put that together again.

Empirically, it is true to say our friendship was forged in Bethlehem. When the mills lit the sky. With one essential difference. Bill came to Bethlehem to be educated at Lehigh University. I saw those big mills gaining on me and ran as fast as a bus and an “A” train could carry me to NYU the New School.

Bill and Bridget George formed a street theatre company: Bethlehem People’s Theatre. I photographed the theater and streets of New York. Our friendship was began as professionals not students, and since the beginning knew our economic lives depended upon our talents. I was hired to document BPT.

Bare with me, don’t close the curtains. Don’t turn off the lights. We are rolling through an explanation of community based theater. And that is central to all the rest to come. Based means it comes from the community, and it’s stories, life blood, myths, truths, lies and culture. Its weather, dreams. and nightmares, its soot and then lack of soot.

The first commission for Bethlehem People’s Theatre (soon we will simply call it Touchstone)was something called “WORKING”. Commissioned by AFL/CIO and presented at the Steelworker’s hall, if memory serves. Production and development cost pegged at 75 bucks.

In the next 30 years, Touchstone would draw from the well of its community: play after play, becoming in the course of which a community institution itself. In the old southside firehouse.  A connoisseur and repository of historical fictions complete with comedic crisis, often no larfing matters.

From the theft of Bill’s Bicycle to the normal ebb & flow of ensemble existence. All of which is the nature of community, of which is the source material and the basis of what Touchstone Theatre is. And the spool upon which we wrap yet another story.

While back … this stuff percolates, often endlessly … the late writer Joan Campion, South Side Bethlehem’s champion, came to Bill with the concept of cemetaries & the histories and stories that rest within them. Now Bill’s a good guy (and fun to tease) so he took this back to the Touchstone grist mill. (a fair explanation of “ensemble”).

Bill: “The graveyard idea had been around a while & we flirted with it on different projects.”  It never took hold in its entirety. Often these concepts are vector based, waiting for the laws of un-intention to begin occupying space.”

‘Bout the same time, Dave Rabaut, Touchstone Board President, became involved in the sesquicentennial recognition of the Civil War and hoped the theater company would find a vehicle. A lot was mentioned including Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As professionals the ensemble knew there would be “ a bit of a tidal wave, economically and aesthetically, with the 150^th anniversary.”

“We’ve always liked doing an original community based piece every couple of years that taps into collective memory. This became the growth of an idea rather than a piece of one. I had been working with THE WHITMAN PIECE for 6 or 8 years which had similar American History, which fit nicely”

Bill just returned to Touchstone after touring lots of Sacred work realizing that to continue it, he would need to be on the road 30-40 weeks a year. At the same time Touchstone was going through its own changes. “So, this was a good time to return to my tribe”

As the vectors crossed books surfaced concerning the cemeteries, the civil war & remembrances surfaced, the ensemble took on numerous shape shifts until a concept of the community history took shape, grants were written, the tribe called together … sort of fitting for a 30^th year at Touchstone Theatre.

After our first meeting … I began to frequent the three main cemeteries: God’s Acre the early Moravian resting place, Nisky Hill (also Union Cemetery on the northside and St. Mark’s on the Southside with the professional reality that if all this went through we would need more than the same tired stuff to create new visual mental space. More of that work later.

So, a year later, after the grants arrived,  we sat in the same café, dividing the check. Just like we used to when Bill and Bridget were starting Touchstone and I designed the Touchstone Logos. Words became reality.

Something else was was buzzing in Bill:

“I’d like to keep the institutional memory of Community Based Theatre alive at Touchstone. The Steel Piece, the street theatre, Jacques  Lecoq. All the original work and all the influences we presented.”

As J.P. Jordan takes over as Artistic Director and many new and talented people arrive, those of us who have passed through Touchstone want the Institutional memories to remain, of artists interested in the life and community in which we live. To appreciate the language of its stories and rites which occur in Community Based Theatre.

“An ability to move theatre from a piece of fragile art to a living and life giving ceremony.” A Resting Place takes us back to our roots. 

Walking back to Touchstone, the sound of all that water passing under all those bridges, mingles with the sound of our footsteps.