GREENSBORO — The Hazen Union Drama Club performed an original play entitled “Emmasey,” written by their teacher and mentor Marc Considine, on Monday evening last week at the Highland Center for the Arts. It is structured as the journey of a young woman to find her father, who had left the family years ago. This production was given at the Vermont Regional Drama Festival in Thetford, March 22, with other plays by Hartford and Windsor High Schools and Thetford Academy, in a full day of performances and drama workshops.
The lead artistic designer and director, along with Marc Considine, was Kaulah Watkevich. In “Emmasey,” they made imaginative use of the unique medium of theater, combining archetypal human emotions of family relationships with fantasy. Puppets of a talking fox and raccoon, a cranky old man, fish and symbolic cloth streamers, one of which represented flowing water, were included. As the scenes change, backgrounds of an apartment interior, a city street, the countryside and a mountain were projected onto a screen behind the players.
As the play begins, the Mother (Kelyna Vanleuvan) and her daughter Emma (Ursa Goldenrose) are arguing passionately about Emma’s desire to look for her father, who had abandoned them but apparently had come by recently hoping to see his daughter. Her mother discourages her in vain.
In the next scene, Emma is in a city encircled by three players (Juniper Book, Chloe Cloutier and Quinn Molleur) dressed in black with ominous dark streamers, which end up draped on top of her as she sits bent over on the ground. A second group of people carrying cloths on poles with lights enter and sing, and she asks them how she can find her father.
A following scene shifts to the countryside with a fox puppet, animated by Quinn Molleur. Emma tells of her quest and the fox asks why she wants to find her father, to which she replies that “He’s part of me.” He wants to see her and that she worries he might be in the hospital. She lies down to sleep and then a raccoon puppet appears, held by Will Helms. He sees that she has a lot of anger and sadness, and advises her to visit the Old Man of the Mountain.
photo by Vanessa Fournier
The fox joins her in climbing up the mountain, where they meet the puppet Old Man, manipulated by Ethan Gann. The Old Man turns out to be unhelpful. He urges Emma to turn back because the place is dangerous. Some of this action is cleverly portrayed by small shadow puppet figures projected onto the mountain.
The next scene is underwater, with three larger, colorful fish on poles swimming about, held by Kelyna Vanleuven, Summer Chernovetz and Madeliene Crank. Four figures dressed in black with white face masks emerge from the background, one of whom is her father (Will Helms). He tells her that, “I was a lousy father to you, I never really cared about you, I’ll help you to get out of here, go back to your mother, she loves you more than I did.”
In the last scene, Emma is back home in the apartment, her mother comes in, she says she’s sorry she left, “I love you,” and they hug each other affectionately.
Vanleuven and Goldenrose both demonstrated their acting skills effectively as mother and daughter, which involved strong feelings. The latter was quite impressive in several of the scenes that involved her crying, which is usually difficult to make convincing on stage. Molleur and Helms were adept at moving the fox and raccoon puppets and speaking for them, as was Book with the Old Man. Altogether “Emmasey” was something different and memorable.
In addition to the play, a video made by the Hazen Union Drama Club last autumn, on a rainy day outside in a Hardwick cemetery was shown. Its premise was intriguing: to get the students to visit the graveyard and find a tombstone of a former resident of Hardwick, then using the date of death do research at the local Historical Society (or online) about that person’s life from their obituary in the Hardwick Gazette. Dressed in costumes of the time, mostly from the late 19th century into the 20th, the actors and actresses recounted incidents and sometimes the actual words of the deceased standing next to their gravestones, giving interesting insights into life in Hardwick when it had a booming granite industry. The characters thus brought back to life ranged from a mother of 11 children, a soda pop seller, an editor of The Hardwick Gazette, a teacher whose baby twins both died, an Italian immigrant family, a traveling salesman and storekeeper and relatively young men who died of granite dust from poorly ventilated work places. It was a great project to integrate local history with meaningful theater.
David K. Rodgers
David K. Rodgers is a writer, mason and card carrying dilettante, who dabbles and babbles in art. He has lived in East Craftsbury for the past 40 years.
