GUILFORD-Michael Nethercott suspects that when Guilford Center Stage came to ask him to create, write, and direct a new play — his fifth for the local company — on the theme of local history in honor of the nation’s 250th birthday this year, they were expecting a conventional dramatization of local lore.
“I’m guessing maybe they thought it would be more conventional in terms of ‘here’s a history, this happened, that happened,’” Nethercott told The Commons in his explaining the form and content of Vermont Mythos, which premieres in October.
“Now, that is true of this play,” he said. But in creating what he described as a “historical fantasy,” Nethercott also decided “to do something [about] who we are as humans, using these characters as representatives of different aspects of humanity."
So that’s how a play about Guilford ended up with a Greek chorus and a jester and characters whose lives overlap in ways that would have defied the space-time continuum in the physical world.
But the underpinnings of Vermont Mythos are solidly grounded in research, Nethercott said.
“I started researching various historical figures, both noted and obscure, with connections to Guilford, to create a cast of characters,” he said. “Some are represented directly onstage, while others are referenced. I came up with a concept that draws from the town’s backstory, but also goes in a more fantastical direction, exploring what it means to be human."
The best known of the historical characters is Ethan Allen, who was sent by the newly formed Vermont Republic to Guilford in 1783 to squelch a group of “Yorkers” whose allegiance lay with New York and the nascent United States, not with Vermont, which wouldn’t join the union until 1791.
Nethercott describes the “braggadocious” Allen as “one of the antagonists.”
Other characters include playwright and judge Royall Tyler, author of the first American comedy to be professionally staged, and his wife, Mary, who penned “the country’s first child-rearing book by a woman.
Lucy Terry and Abijah Prince, former slaves who owned property in town, were terrorized by neighbors with what Nethercott described as “racial animus.” Terry Prince, these days known as the writer of the oldest known African American literature in the United States, pleaded her case in front of the Governor’s Council, then the highest court in Vermont and won her case, he said. (The story does not end there, and does not continue happily.)
Many of the details of figures from town history, like the first Colonists, Micah Rice and his wife, Silence, the narrator of the play, are lost to history, Nethercott said, creating a vacuum that requires artistic license to fill.
“Any history that I put in, I researched,” he said. “I don’t make up facts.”
But “I may amend things a little,” he allowed. “When Lucy goes in front of the board, I massage the words a little bit, but it’s basically what the exchange was has come down to us.”
Nethercott directs the premiere, which features performances by Sasha Cooke, Geof Dolman, Denise Evans, Warren Friedman, Jenny Holan, Alex Lacey, Dyana Lee, Nick Morgan, Zoe Nelson, Brandy Reynolds, Addison Rhys, Yayba Rios, Rebecca Saunders, Lois Scott-Conley, Bob Tucker, and Ann-Marie White.
Producer is Don McLean, Sue Kelly is stage manager, with Mael March as production assistant, and technical designer is Bree Lacey, assisted by Peter Broussard.
This will be Nethercott’s fifth production that he has presented at Guilford Center Stage. His past works include Spoon River, Haunts of the Season, and Our Enemy’s Cup.
For Nethercott, a multidisciplinary creator who has written novels and plays of different genres (mysteries and a western) and who has been a performing clown, the process of toggling between fact and fantasy and juggling multiple voices from multiple eras has also straddled a fine line between risk and reward.
“There were times when it was like, ‘Am I on firm ground with this?’ Like, all these components — do they work?” he said.
But by the time Nethercott started recruiting actors, he said it became clear that, “Oh, yeah — I think it really does.”
Performances of Vermont Mythos take place on the first weekend of October: Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Oct. 1-3, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 4 at 2 p.m. at the fully-accessible Broad Brook Community Center, 3940 Guilford Center Rd. Admission is at the door at $16 per person, by cash, check, PayPal, or Venmo. For more information, contact Don McLean at don.inscape@gmail.com or 802-257-1961.
This Arts item by Jeff Potter was written for The Commons.