-Actors Theatre Playhouse (ATP) in West Chesterfield, New Hampshire, continues its season with 26 Pebbles by Eric Ulloa for the next three weekends.
A documentary of sorts, the drama, according to an ATP press release, presents an “unflinching yet ultimately hopeful portrait of Newtown, Connecticut, in the aftermath” of the 2012 mass shootings at the town’s Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Using material from extensive interviews with residents — parents, teachers, first responders, and community leaders — “Ulloa’s verbatim theater piece channels the raw voices of a town grappling with unimaginable loss, capturing grief, anger, confusion, and the slow, stubborn emergence of healing,” the organization writes.
An apt metaphor, the title references the 26 lives lost at Sandy Hook, each, as the news release describes, “a pebble dropped into the water of humanity, sending ripples through a community forever changed.”
When asked if any levity is woven in, Director Bob Kramsky says, “Yes — not laugh out loud, but smiles.”
Kramsky, who’d been director of theater at Brattleboro Union High School for nearly 50 years and who has many Vermont Theatre Company shows under his belt, notes this is his second full-length play with ATP. He’s also directed two 10-minute plays for the playhouse.
He leads a six-actor cast portraying diverse voices of Newtown: Shafiya Finger, Rob Gray, Ian Hefele, Ann Linge, Bridget McBride, and Catherine Verow.
With the retirement of ATP Founder and Artistic Director Sam Pilo, leadership of ATP has been taken over by a committee of a dozen area directors, Kramsky among them. The Commons spoke with him recently about the upcoming production.
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Annie Landenberger: Why this play?
Bob Kramsky: I had directed The Laramie Project [a 2000 drama by Moisés Kaufman about reactions to the 1998 murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard] at the high school. And I loved that vehicle where the dialogue in the script is made up of what people actually said in interviews.
Playwright Eric Ulloa went to Newtown, interviewed people about the shooting, and shaped that into the dialogue and the monologues that we actually hear on stage.
It’s an ensemble piece, and I love working with actors who are in an ensemble, meaning there isn’t a lead role. They all have equal responsibility.
And they play multiple roles — six actors playing 22 parts, which is a challenge, obviously, for them as well as for [me].
A.L.: So why now?
B.K.: Although the school’s shooting is the pivotal plot event, it’s more than a play about a school shooting. It’s about a community and how they deal with tragedy and how, after the tragedy, they’re are able to support each other and come together — move forward.
I hate to say it, but school shootings — all kinds of shootings and violent acts — are becoming commonplace. Every day you pick up the newspaper, you listen to the news, and you learn about another terrorist event or some kind of shooting. And we’re sort of anesthetized by it.
And you say, “Well, it couldn’t happen here,” and then, of course, that’s what Newtown, Connecticut, thought. That’s what Uvalde, Texas, thought, and going back to Columbine [High School in Colorado], nobody thought it could happen there. And it did.
So what interests me is: How do you deal with tragedy?And how do you move forward and try to make something positive come out of [something terrible]?
A.L.: And that’s reflected in the script? Is the tenor one of hope?
B.K.: Oh, yes. It ends on the note of hope and perseverance and love. And support.
The parents of Sandy Hook have created an organization and have raised money, and they help educate people about gun violence among teenagers, among young people. So that’s a very positive outlook. They have come together and made something very positive and helpful for all of us.
A.L.: Can you think of vehicles in theater’s more recent past that have done that? I’m thinking of protest theater of the ’60s and ’70s.
B.K.: Sure, and going back to World War II, there were a lot of plays that dealt with tyranny and oppression, dictatorship, and so on, whether they [aligned] specifically with what was going on in World War II or whether it was more subtle.
I’m thinking Jean Anouilh’s Antigone. He took Sophocles’ Antigone and in the late ’40s adapted it because France had been occupied by the Germans.
A.L.: And it spoke perfectly to that time period.
So one character playing several roles, how does that work? I mean, is it all within grasp?
B.K.: Yeah, what I’ve worked with the actors on: How can you use what you have — your body, your voice, your emotions, your attitude, your facial expression — to create different characters?
The actors never leave the stage, so they make the transformations right there in front of the audience. I am allowing them minor costume accessories and props to help the audience understand the transitions of characters.
So [one] actor might put on a scarf to become a character, and another might put on a vest so the audience is aware of the fact that they’re changing characters. The audience might not catch on right at the start which character each actor is playing, but eventually they’ll start picking up on the qualities of that character, the attributes, their posture, their mannerisms, their voice.
A.L.: The cast is embracing it?
B.K.: Oh, for sure. It’s pretty emotionally draining on them. And it certainly is going to be an emotional ride for the audience.
The play is kind of broken up into three parts, and the first is an introduction to the town. And it’s very much like Thornton Wilder introducing us to [Grover’s Corners in] Our Town: This is where the church is, this is where the town hall is, the general store.
And so we get to know the layout of Newtown and the important people of the town and some of the traditions of the town: the parades, the Halloween celebration, the Christmas tree lighting — those kinds of things.
Then the middle third is where the Sandy Hook shooting actually takes place and [you see] the shock and the awe and the horror. The emotional response and the anger and the frustration — all that goes on in the middle.
And then the final third is, “OK, it’s happened. How do we console each other? And how do we come out of this as a community supporting each other and showing our love and compassion for the community and members of the community?”
A.L.: The set?
B.K.: Yeah, the script actually calls for two blackboards, but our space is limited, so we’ve got one blackboard, because the play takes place at a Town Meeting six months after the shooting. And the community members are there talking about what they went through and what they can do about it.
So the blackboard is there to both establish kind of the Town Meeting and to remind us of a school, a school room. The blackboard is something that’s highlighted and always visible.
A.L.: What can you say about the power of art to influence change?
B.K.: That’s why we love theater. It’s not just to entertain but to instruct. And we hope that audiences will be moved and changed and maybe inspired to do something — to take action, even if it’s just to write a letter to a congressman or send a check to a certain organization, or to go home and look at their own guns that may not be secured and locked up in a house where there may be young people.
So if it inspires anyone in the audience to take these kinds of actions, then it’s important and it’s valuable. That’s this play specifically, but I think a lot of theater, a lot of art, does that.
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26 Pebbles runs Friday, Aug. 7 to Saturday, Aug. 22 at Actors Theatre Playhouse, 21 Main St., West Chesterfield, New Hampshire. Advance reservations are strongly recommended at atplayhouse.org.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.