DUMMERSTON-As turkeys are getting dressed and with hall-decking around the corner, Vermont Theatre Company (VTC) offers counterpoint.
As described by a VTC press release, this weekend's evening of four one-act plays offered at East Dummerston's Evening Star Grange promises audience members a "dark and unsettling night of theater full of psychological thrills and tender moments" in a show that will "crush you and give you hope for humanity, all in one evening."
'A dark psychological thriller'
First in the program's lineup of four roughly half-hour plays is The Candidate by Brent Holland, directed by Harral Hamilton.
Hamilton, of Brattleboro, is an outreach job advocate for Groundworks who's been involved in a range of area arts over the years, including local theater. He's been a set designer, lighting tech, stage manager, and, for the last 15 years, an actor.
He describes his first directing venture as "a dark psychological thriller."
"My play is about individuals who wake up in a room with no memory of how they got there or who they are - and no way out," he says. "And they are put through a series of challenges to determine something that [...] will be revealed in the end."
At the core, he explains, emerge big questions: "What are humans capable of doing when put in certain pressured situations? What's inside them that they don't know about? And that can be good or not so good ... it can be a little bit of both."
Hamilton had been drawn to the simplicity of Holland's script.
"In the casting," he explains, "there's no sense of gender; any gender can play any role. And they're really stripped down to the abstract colors of the shirt that they're wearing."
The nameless protagonists "have lost their memories, so they don't know who they are. But somehow instinct is still within them," he adds.
A simple script and bare-bones set allow him and the cast "to focus on the words on the page," Hamilton says.
Hamilton says he's loving all aspects of directing except the scheduling - "trying to get five people all in the same room together to rehearse."
Otherwise, though, encouraging meaningful, nuanced delivery from the actors "is very natural to me," he says.
"I've worked with dozens of directors, and they all have their own style," notes Hamilton, who hopes to glean from those experiences - and from his studies of literature and history - as he holistically shapes the production.
'History rhymes, history repeats'
Bar Dykes by Merril Mushroom is directed by Eli Coughlin-Galbraith, who notes that the VTC lineup is "an even split between dark psychological thrillers and serious pieces with levity and comedic moments. I'm one of the latter."
Set in a 1950s gay bar, Bar Dykes is about 11 lesbian patrons there one night.
"There's fighting, there's flirting, there's dancing; people break up, people get together. There's drama, and a raid" by the New York City vice squad, the director says.
Through it all, Coughlin-Galbraith says, "is the grim reality of being gay in the 1950s. It's sort of hanging there, pressing down and down. And under it, and within it all, people laugh, people dance; they fall in love."
Grandson of John Kenneth Galbraith and son of James, Coughlin-Galbraith grew up partly in Texas, and partly in Vermont. Having come from New York with an undergraduate degree from Columbia and a master's degree in historical linguistics at New York University, the director became involved in theater nine years ago as both actor and stage crew at VTC, with a directorial debut last April in VTC's 24-hour play event.
"So I started as a stage manager because I said, 'Oh, I can organize things. I can keep track of the pieces. I know how to put a whole together out of all of the parts.'" Discovering a love for storytelling, they recall, "the collaborative nature of theatrical storytelling really appealed to me. So I started acting, too."
For 11 years, Coughlin-Galbraith has run Shapeshifters, a custom tailoring/clothing company offering shapewear and undergarments largely for trans and gender-nonconforming customers - an experience that has influenced an approach to directing: "Running a business means that I like logistics. I like to keep track of moving parts and make sure everything runs smoothly."
They have been "collecting gay plays that I would like to direct since 2019" and immediately said "Oh, I want this now" when VTC producer Jessica Iris shared it.
"This feels like the precise time to do this gay play about living under the pressure of a fascist oppressive state, under the pressure of knowing that you could be arrested at any time for being who you are, [of] knowing that you cannot trust or believe in or be protected by the police," they add, hoping the audience "can glimpse of ways to connect more deeply with people. Especially when you're feeling pressured by the greater systems."
Bar Dykes yields, too, "a sharp awareness of how the 1950s and the 2020s are close in many ways: history rhymes, history repeats."
Questions of family (and no spoilers)
Kay Beckett, who holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in acting, has been doing theater in the area nonstop for a year now, a dozen shows, "one after the other."
"It's good, though. I had to just really stay organized and pace myself," she says as she plans her one-act, The Lemesurier Inheritance, an adaptation by Miles Ledoux of Springfield, Vermont, of the Agatha Christie story.
"For the current production, I've written out everything that needs to happen" in great detail, she says, adding that many audiences aren't aware that directing and producing involves such management and attention.
Having been smitten by another of Ledoux's Christie adaptations (Thumb Mark of St. Peter, at Guilford Center Stage), Beckett was happy to hear that the playwright had many more such adaptations. She chose one that featured well-known Christie character Hercule Poirot.
"The way he handles the language is just fantastic," Beckett says of Ledoux's setting.
What does a 21st-century jaded and over-teched audience take away from this work?
"Well, it's questions of family," Beckett says. "I don't want to give too much away about the play, but it's family relationships that aren't working. The audience needs to know there's a curse going on. But is there really?
"At the heart of it, it's that things are not working between a husband and a wife, but it's Agatha Christie, right? So we know there's something else.
"And, well ... you don't want to know the ending, right?"
Right.
"The audience can take a look and see what went wrong and why, and were people justified in how they behaved? Was this a reaction to what happened that triggered this? Or was there always some madness there? So, yeah, well, I mean, old English families, right?" she says.
In the original short story, Christie revealed more of the family's psychological and behavioral issues, but Beckett says she's "stayed away from that, and tried to keep it just dark and atmospheric."
An exploration of 'the artist within'
The last piece on the program is Vebrook Hospital for the Reeducation of the Criminally Sane by Anita Parrott and directed by Saskia Bailey-de Bruijn.
Holding it up to the description of the evening, "I'd say there are tender moments, but it leans heavily into some of the darkness," they say. "It's an abstract play, which has been a lot of fun to explore because it gives me as a director and my actors a lot of space to experiment and create."
Set in "a mental hospital where four artists are faced with four days left to live," Bailey-de Bruijn explains, the play explores choices made "in the face of an institution that is threatening their life and/or their livelihood."
Of process, they add, "We've been exploring a lot of these very dark themes that sometimes feel all too close to home as we look at the broader context of the world."
Bailey-de Bruijn has directed in nontraditional settings before, but this is their directorial debut, "with an established script written by someone other than me as a starting point."
"I've done a lot of self-directed, self-produced projects, a lot of devising with friends, but this is my first bona fide attempt at directing a play with a theater company," they say.
Theater, though, has been part of their life when "I was writing and directing the holiday plays with my family from, you know, 5 years old on. I was involved in the New England Youth Theatre growing up from 2008 to 2015. Heavily involved there."
While in college studying broadcast journalism, they were involved in the theater department and, since coming back to Vermont in 2019, they have been "primarily a performing artist."
To bring this story about artists and what's at stake for them to life, Bailey-de Bruijn "has been doing everything I can with my cast to enhance the artist within all of us: to approach it, not just as theater artists," but, as the script requires, as a painter, a poet, a singer, and a mime.
"So we've been exploring those things within all of us," they say. "All the paintings on stage are created by my cast, all of the music on stage is sung and recorded by the cast, too."
This world premiere by Brooklyn-based Parrott is presented as an ode to artists and to the consequences of choosing your art in the face of a world that wants everything except your creativity.
"So it is dark," Bailey-de Bruijn says. "It is a bit macabre and twisted and dystopian."
But, they say, it is "also an ode to love, to expression, to creativity."
"An Evening of One Acts" at the Evening Star Grange, 1008 East-West Rd., Dummerston Center, runs Friday, Nov. 21, through Sunday, Nov. 23. Shows are at 7 p.m. on Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are available on a sliding scale of $10 to $20, at the door or at vermonttheatrecompany.org.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.