Existential anguish in one act
Toolbox
By CLARA ROSE THORNTON - Published: January 14, 2010
In a dim room in a small New England town, there are tree boughs with scraggly branches, affixed in rows and protruding from the walls.
They loom — the combined shape of their arches has an uncanny effect, as if they are swaying outward toward the center of the room, steadily encroaching, preparing to envelop an unsuspecting audience.
In the center of this room in a lone haze of light stand a man and a woman, separated by a wooden stool. The woman is gray-haired and solemn and looking off into the distance. The man, with a perturbed expression, reaches out across the stool, unable to grasp his companion who, though bathed in his same halo of makeshift forest, appears millions of miles away.
This is a scene from "The Nine Questions," a play by Mud Time Theater founders Denny Partridge and Steve Friedman. I'd been invited to attend its most recent performance, at Main Street Arts in Saxtons River, and was completely unprepared for what I'd encounter.
"The Nine Questions" draws from famed Vermont lore. In the pre-Revolutionary era a pioneer woman was separated from her farmer husband in the woods near Rockingham. She was found six months later in N.H., naked, delirious and her infant dead. She claimed to never have crossed the Connecticut River, and to have wandered far north in a straight line, into Canada, mysteriously making her way back down the other side. The play concerns itself with the first few weeks and months after she is reunited with her husband. The work's title comes from the framing series of inquiries the saddened and bewildered husband asks of his beloved.
Mud Time creates chamber theater, meaning their plays contain less than four characters and the action takes place in a single location. As their Web site states, they "create plays of particular interest to year-round Vermonters, and perform in a rough, popular style, with highly developed skills and a taste for reality."
This taste for reality leads Partridge and Friedman to seek out true tales often possessing a dark, existentialist bent. For example, for "The Nine Questions," when they discovered the 1864 Bellows Falls Times article about the "lost woman of Rockingham" from the previous century, they painstakingly sought every detail they could from libraries' microfilm archives and current literature detailing the legend. What resulted from this cacophony of perspectives is the acute distillation of time and distance between two people, of troubled marriage and mental disintegration amongst the wilderness, in a two-person conversation performed with an audience closely encircling the action like hawks descended upon a particularly gruesome corpse, stunned into silence.
Beginning this weekend, Mud Time Theater will perform their chilling chamber renditions every Friday at 7 p.m., for free, at the newly opened Meliora community arts space in downtown Bellows Falls.
Though Mud Time is a touring company, its nonprofit home is Rockingham Arts and Museum Project, whose offices are housed in the same Exner Block live/work artist compound that contains the Meliora storefront. Denny Partridge, one-half of the dynamic "troupe," co-founded the space.
Partridge and her longtime romantic partner Friedman are bona fide San Francisco and New York City theater legends, permanently relocated to southern Vermont five years ago. Working together since 1970, they are both veterans of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, where Partridge was a groundbreaking director and Friedman acted and wrote, excelling in the commedia dell'arte style.
While with the Mime Troupe, Partridge, the recipient of two Fulbright Scholarships, offered the world "A Man Has His Pride," the first nationwide hit of the emerging women's movement.
In 1976, the couple moved to New York City and founded Modern Times Theater. They collaborated on approximately 60 productions; toured throughout the United States and in Europe, Asia, and Central America; performed their own plays and plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Jarry and others; and won numerous academic and professional honors. Their collaborative method generally entails Friedman seeing to the script and Partridge to the direction and design, though these responsibilities merge with regularity. Acting is equally shared.
Mud Time Theater forms their newest project, and with great respect and admiration for their adopted New England rural environs, they have decided solely to isolate the legends, lore, culture and true crimes of the region, though with a decidedly broad and somewhat icy cosmopolitan "outsider" perspective. They seek the total democratization of their works, and perform in correctional facilities, libraries, town halls, churches and living rooms as often as in traditional performing arts venues.
Their set is often just a single chair, to focus all attention on the actors and unfolding story. Their mantra: "Theater should not be about real estate or even about shopping. Consume less and be more. A bare stage is an asset."
This unique theater development in southern Vermont should prove to be quite intriguing. Kicking off their Friday Night Free Theater season is "Mildred Taken Crazy," about an 1897 Vermont killing of one young lady by another over a man they were both engaged to. In 40 minutes, the play spans five decades and engages the audience in a thorough deconstruction of the human compulsion toward violence. If the production is anything similar to the finely wrought anguish and confusion of "The Nine Questions," spectators are in for a deliciously somber treat.
Future Friday Night Free Theater productions will include "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" and "The Yellow Wallpaper." For more information, head to www.mudtimetheater.com.
Clara Rose Thornton is a freelance cultural critic and arts journalist originally hailing from Chicago who now lives in an artists' colony in Bellows Falls. She can be reached at clara@inkblotcomplex.com, or through her Web site, clararosethornton.com.
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