Years later we were gathering scenes for our first ever Trunk Show and Emily sent one to me called The Moonbeam Girl, and again I was struck by how simple and sweet and heartfelt the story was: A boy going off to war and spending his last night with a gal he’s been paying for, but would date him for free if he’d only ask…
The first time I heard The Tennis Party it was at company member, Jenifer Henry’s, birthday get-together. All the Strange Tree gals were there at Emily and Kara’s little Southport apartment with chocolate and cheese and wine, as Carol and Jen read the parts of two friends navigating the death of a third, trying to cope with guilt, abandoned love, and terrible house guest manners.
These three little plays stuck with all of us - every once in a while they’d pop up in conversation – I love that one! We have to do something with that… Wouldn’t it be neat if…? And so...
When we were deciding what our second show for 2010 would be, the idea of doing The War Plays came up. We decided we would take the three plays – linked together only by the fact that each of them took place during wartime - and give them a home.
When looking at the three pieces in the context of putting them together, a common thread kept popping up; That of lonely people searching for connection, but also hiding from it. We have Minnie protecting herself from further heartache with a layer of iciness and standoffishness; Jackie and Denny keeping each other at arm’s length by introducing money into the relationship and letting it go on that way because it’s easier not to get in too deep; Elliot, denying himself real love with a willing and equal partner even as she waits for him (in a thunder storm) to come back to her.
And then there were the characters that pushed that connection, that forced the other characters to *see* what they could have, *see* what they deserve. Love. Companionship. A home in another person: Evan with his unrelenting optimism, his insistence that life is something to be enjoyed at all times, chipping away at the armor that Minnie has constructed around herself; Lewis, everyone’s favorite house guest, trying to resuscitate his friend who is drowning in guilt by forcing him to see that he does have something left in the world after his brother’s death, that he does deserve to have happiness in his life even after everything that’s happened.
There was also the common thread of The Brother. Paul, Minnie’s simple older brother whom she has become the de facto mother figure for; Pauly, Jackie’s brother who rents her out for dates with the neighborhood boys to make ends meet; and John, the third corner in a love triangle between two brothers and the girl down the lane. Three very different young men – two of whom never actually appear in their respective scenes but are such a presence that they’re impossible to ignore. And so they are there too in the form of one actor, shifting costumes and body language and filling out, in those in-between musical transitions, the worlds of the pieces.
Strange Tree loves music. Whenever we can we use it, either via house music or a live band, we do, and for an era where music was so important and meant and *said* so much it seemed like the obvious choice to use that music as the connective tissue of the pieces. Those moments happening underneath the music allow the characters to introduce themselves before their scenes, helps us stay with them and follow the arc of their relationships from beginning to end:
Evan seeing Minnie and Paul on the street before meeting them again at the Tube Shelter, and then later waiting for her at Middlesex and Harrow with his signed Fred Astaire picture.
Denny paying for Jackie’s company, awkwardly dancing together and trying to get the steps right, to get it right, and then sharing a kiss and a promise to write.
And the Tennis gang – three boys, best friends, two of them brothers who are both in love with the same girl, jealousy and one-up-manship leading to tragedy that forces a gap in a circle of friends that is widening by the hour and threatening to unravel all together...
Kitty Berlin and The Allied Orchestra, the most current version of The Strange Tree Group’s house band, underscores these in-between moments of the show as they play popular tunes form the era such as “Bei Mir Bist du Schon”, “The Deepest Shelter in Town”, “It’s Been a Long Long Time”, and “One Girl and Two Boys”, determined to put on a hell of a show in spite of the loss of several of their members and the threat of (possible) enemy planes flying overhead...
When we were researching the Blitz we came across, again and again, stories of people with the attitude of “Go ahead and bomb us. We’re not going to stop living our lives.” And they didn’t. There’s one video in particular of an older women being interviewed after half her house was destroyed. She looked the camera right in the eye and cheerfully said she was moving right back in. It was her house. She wasn’t going anywhere.
And then there were the images – a few in particular really struck a cord when deciding on a framing device for the pieces, and they became a kind of mission statement for the play:
People still needed milk. They still needed to escape into a book, or a film or a dance hall. They put on their three piece suits and they stepped over the rubble on their way to work. They went back to their homes and if they weren’t there anymore they found them in other people.
In a time when there was so much heartache and danger, death and destruction, people needed release. They needed Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Songs that turned serious Air Raid instructions into funny little ditties.
The arts give us comfort. The arts allow us an escape when it’s needed most.
The framing device of the War Plays follows a group of artists - Strange Tree’s own little ragtag USO with it’s depleted band members (only a cellist , accordion player, drummer, French horn player and lead singer, are left of the “Allied Orchestra”) and a group of young actors from the States who have traveled to London in the winter of ’44 to put on their show. They get a little bit more than they bargained for when that show gets interrupted by what came to be known as the “Baby Blitz”.
In 1944, with the original Blitz having ended a few years prior, the troupe performs in a theatre in London where we have transported the Atheneaum for about an hour and a half, and are about to start the show when an alarm sounds. Not knowing what to expect or how bad it’s going to be, they decide the show must go on.
It’s my house. You can bomb it all you like. I’m not going anywhere.
And so they perform their play - pieces that span the War thus far - The first taking place during the original Blitz of 1940, the second in America during the deployment of US troops in ’42, and the final scene taking place just after American deployment in France in ’44. The pieces also span the progression of a relationship. Strangers meet. There’s a spark. They grow closer, they make promises. They lose each other. They find each other again.
With The War Plays, The Strange Tree group hopes to celebrate the people who persevered and stubbornly went on with their lives during one of the most horrendous acts of destruction in a War full of them. Danger at every turn, they defiantly went out to dinner, went dancing, went to music halls and theatres. They fell in and out of love, they lost people dear to them and found people they never would have met at all who changed their lives irrevocably.
The Strange Tree Group also wishes to celebrate the artists who traveled to those War torn continents and those who still do so today determined to helps folks forget, even if only for little while, how hard life can be by reminding them, in any way they can, how sometimes wonderful as well.
Kate Nawrocki, Director
www.strangetree.org
