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The two-hour round-trip ride from Stonington to Isle au Haut on the ferry is enough time to eat a sandwich, read the newspaper or catch up on knitting. But is it enough time to write a minimusical about a boy and his father who has a hidden past? Or about a lobster who turns into a woman and teaches two brothers about their destinies?
Those were the questions that hung in the fog-bound Stonington harbor last Friday when four professional playwrights from New York City boarded the morning run of the Mink, which delivers mail to the island each day, with the goal of returning two hours later with two fully written plays and two fully written musicals.
And as if that breakneck pace weren’t enough, the second the writers returned to the Stonington dock, they handed their scripts to directors and actors, composers and technical staff, and – right there on the dock – the rehearsal process began. Within 36 hours, the four shows, each about 12 minutes long, were cast, written, rehearsed, blocked, scored, costumed and, on Saturday night, presented to a full audience at the Stonington Opera House.
Given the wild pace of the creative period, it was understandable on opening night of “TheFERRYmusicals” that Lawrence Feeney, co-producer of the event with Stonington’s Opera House Arts, was pumped. He stepped onto stage and asked the audience if it was ready for fun. The answer came loudly: “Yes!” But that wasn’t good enough for Feeney. He asked again, like a barker trying to get kids into the circus. This time the house boomed: “YES!”
In an hour, the audience was booming again, this time with applause. The four shows – two musicals and two plays – showed
that it doesn’t take years to write a play or weeks to mount a show. All it takes is motion.
That is, after all, what propelled Feeney, a New York actor, to produce “TheAtrainplays,” a series of short plays written on one of the longer lines of the New York City subway system and performed the next day at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Feeney got the idea for the plays when he was riding the subway going to an early morning shoot of “The Sopranos,” for which he was playing the body double for Joe Pantoliano.
He began staging the shows two years ago and will perform the 14th installment in the fall.
“Magic” is the word Feeney used to describe both the success of the show and the experience of participating in the productions.
“If you put yourself on this kind of deadline and let your artistry come out, you can’t fail,” said Feeney, who is 38, was born in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and wore a New York fire department cap during the misty ferry ride. “The writers write. The performers perform. There’s no time for egos. This is a six-week rehearsal period condensed into 24 hours. It’s the NASCAR of theater. We show you the accidents and the winners.”
The two-night event in Stonington was the first time Feeney has taken his show on the road – beyond 207th Street, that is. The invitation came from Carol Estey, co-artistic director of the Opera House and sometime director-choreographer on the New York plays. She wanted to stage the high-octane event in Stonington to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Opera House Arts, which operates the restored building. In addition to presenting the shows, the benefit gala performance was a platform for Linda Nelson, executive director of Opera House Arts, to announce a capital campaign to raise $750,000 over the next three years. Members plan to winterize the building to extend programming, including films and educational activities, throughout the year.
The ferry plays, Estey said, were a perfect example of the work she and her colleagues, including Nelson, Judith Jerome and Linda Pattie, targeted early on as the type of live performances they wanted the opera house to produce. Last summer, the group produced a musical version of “Dracula.” This year, they went for something closer to reality theater.
To that end, the day before the ferry trip, Estey introduced the writers to the Aldriches, a family that has run the ferry for many years. The writers, who listened to the Mainers’ stories about life on the ferry, called the men “brilliant” and recorded their tales, variations of which showed up in the final presentations onstage. The next day, they picked chits of paper out of a bag to determine how many actors they would have in their casts. Then they reached into a briefcase filled with photographs to randomly pick the actual actors, four of whom were from Maine.
“I really wanted to bring the energy of the ‘Atrain’ and the idea that we can do this type of work in Stonington,” said Estey, who lives in upstate New York most of the year but spent childhood summers on Deer Isle where her family once ran a summer dance camp. “The writers really absorbed the details of this town and wrote about it in a way that amazed me.”
And amazed the audience, too. If Feeney had to encourage them at the beginning of the night, there was no silencing them by the end of the night. They loved the shows.
In one play about a film crew that comes to shoot on Isle au Haut, the audience enjoyed references to the tension between flatlanders and locals, between those who pronounce “isle” in the French way (EEL) and those who pronounce it in the Stonington way (AISLE). In a surreal play, about a boy who is half moose and wants to return to Isle au Haut to find his moose dad, his mother (played by Jerome) gets blamed for not making the trip to Blue Hill to get his antler-inhibiting medicine. Cell phones that don’t work, Yankees who give partial answers, seasickness among fishermen’s family members, mistaking Brooklyn and Brooklin, and L.L. Bean boots all came up in the course of the evening.
It was a testament to Feeney’s imported creative team from New York City, including writers Erica Silberman, Craig Pospisil, David Riedy and Harry Kakatsakis, music director Alec Berlin and composer-lyricist Jeremy Schonfeld – as well as actors. One New York-based actor, Jill Van Note, was born in Augusta and had no problem recreating a Down East accent.
The night was also a testament to the locals who collaborated with the New York team: Estey directed and choreographed one of the shows, musician Frank Gotwals wrote two original songs and performed them between plays, Bill Raiten and Caitlin Shetterly each directed a show, songwriters Evelyn and Jan Kok wrote music and lyrics, Wayne Merrit designed the lighting and built the set, and Tosca, the opera house dog, rode the ferry and made a cameo appearance in one of the shows.
“It’s a mystery how it all works out in the end,” said Feeney. “What happens happens. When you fly by the seat of your pants, you learn to expect nothing and everything.”
“It’s a whirlwind,” said Pospisil, who has written 10 of the New York shows. “I have been here less than 72 hours, and I feel I’ve been here two weeks.”
“The single most important thing to a theater artist is to have a place to perform,” said Riedy, who wrote the musical about the lobster girl. “Knowing that there are places like this to be a home is invaluable.”
Riedy hopes to rework his play and possibly re-stage it in Stonington someday.
If he does, Galen Koch, a 15-year-old sophomore at the Deer Isle-Stonington High School, wouldn’t mind playing the lobster again.
“It was great. It was really intense,” said Koch, who has performed in other local plays. “After this, learning lines and what to do onstage will be easy. I feel I can handle anything now.”
Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangor
dailynews.net.
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