In 2018, I conducted 14 interviews with community members about the history of the community theater group Stage East in Eastport, Maine. I grew up playing in an orchestra in the same building as Stage East, so this project was deeply personal. I published the results of my interviews and research as a four-part audio documentary about this rural town, social division in the community, and how people attempt to bridge those gaps with the arts. I am honored to have contributed to preserving the history of my community and sharing the lessons it can offer for other local art and theater communities.
This is a story about Eastport, Maine, and the Cornerstone Theater Company. It's also a story about theater, art, community, and rural America.
Click to expand trailer transcription
[ocean sound effects]
Quinn: Eastport, Maine is a small town that’s made entirely of islands, with a population of only about 1300 people. It has a large annual Fourth of July festival. Once a very successful trading port, after the fishing industry declined the city went bankrupt. Fishing is still the primary industry in Eastport, which tells you a little bit about how economically bustling the town is. Indeed, in the 2010 census the median age was 54.5 years old. It’s a typical small town story in America—it was reliant on an industry that no longer supports the town. The population is aging. The only feature that makes it stand out is its claim to fame as the eastern most city in the United States, and that’s just a geographical fact. It’s also a geographical fact that I grew up right next to Eastport.
You can imagine my surprise, then, to discover the name of this unassuming little town in my college homework. That was when I learned that Eastport is part of a story much larger than itself. On one level, it’s the story of Cornerstone Theater, a theater company that started as a group of idealistic college students traveling the country and building theater with different communities. On another level, it’s the story of community arts in America, and why they are in more trouble and are more important than ever before. But even beyond that it’s the story of what rural America is, and why a fishing town with 1300 people is full of love, and pain, and hope.
[ocean side effects fade into Americana music]
Joyce: And the arts commission said “oh you wouldn’t want to go there, there’s nothing there. It’s just a fishing, shipping town.” And they knew immediately that was where they wanted to go because that’s what they were looking for, a place where there wasn’t theater.
Brian: You know I talk about doing theater here, I try to tell people who I feel like don’t understand what a gift it is, not just to have a community theater, but to have a community theater in a place like this.
James: And so the theater seems to me to be a place where we get to embody that reality and abstraction and come to grips with it and find consolations and joys in that problem. Whether comic or tragic. But it’s an art form that requires us all to embrace our humanity and share it with each other in real time. And that’s what makes it miraculous, right? And why it will never go away.
Lou: It certainly has been a hugely satisfying thing in my life for all these years, I can’t imagine life without it.
Quinn: Eastport is part of a story much larger than itself. This podcast is telling that story. I hope you’ll come along with me.
Meg: There are a lot of wonderful places we have yet to go, I feel like we’re just getting started.
Eastport, Maine is on the edge of the earth. This episode explores the history of this city and the beginning of organized arts in the community.
Click to expand episode one transcription
[Ship bell dings, the sound of children playing by water starts in the background]
David: I mean we knew what New York theater was, we knew what Boston theater was, we knew what California theater was, but we didn’t know what America was.
Greg: Eastport has been, since its inception, a fluid community. There’s a lot of talk about people from away, and people from here, this is not a new phenomena at all, this has been the case in Eastport for 200 years. It has to do with the fact that this is a border community, it’s sort of the edge of the Earth right here.
Eastport, Maine is on the edge of the Earth. On one side, there’s ocean. As you might be able to guess from its name, it’s the easternmost city in the United States and is a port city. Technically, it is ocean on all sides—Eastport is entirely made of islands. Now with ocean on one side and forest on the other, this may not sound like the ideal place to mount an ambitious musical that requires dozens of cast and crew members—but I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s talk about what Eastport is.
Eastport’s own website describes it like this:
[newscaster background music begins]
“Eastport, Maine is one of the most innovative small cities in the United States. We are growing and we want you to come and see why. Eastport has huge advantages for companies looking to invest in the Northeast, including a deep-water port, an innovative approach to business environment, a fantastic quality of life, and a committed and active citizenry.
Connected by causeway, airport, deep-sea port, and ferries, Eastport is at the center of a vibrant binational business and cultural community. As a tourism destination, Eastport rivals many of its better-known neighbors to the south, but with less traffic!”
[Americana music fades in]
Now, “less traffic” is one way to put it. Eastport, with its 1200 residents, is one of the more populated places in Washington County. Of course, Washington County has a population density of 13 people per square mile. It takes about four hours to drive from one end to another and there are only 3 traffic lights in that entire area.
And, in fact, none of those traffic lights are in Eastport. Just as the website claims, the city is built similarly to the more well-known wealthy towns further south down the Maine coast. There are plenty of cities down the Maine coastline full of tourists exploring the cute independent stores selling original art and handcrafted sweets, nature lovers enjoying the gorgeous views, and so-called “snowbirds” who live in Southern states in the winter and Maine in the summer. A lot of these towns are relatively close to Portland, the largest city in Maine, which boasts a large airport, a huge number of incredible restaurants, and close proximity to Boston, Massachusetts.
Eastport, on the other hand, is four hours north of Portland. While it has the same kind of amazing views and charming stores as more southern coastal towns, the downtown is exactly one street. There is still a strong tourism industry in Eastport, especially surrounding its popular festivals in the summer. In fact, the Eastport Independence Day festival is one of the largest in Maine. Still, despite the inviting landscape and reasonable real estate costs, pure geographic reality makes it difficult to attract the same level of tourists and summering investment bankers.
It wasn’t always this way. For a period of time in the 1800s, Eastport was the second largest trading port in the United States, only behind New York City. Its northeast location was a great advantage and at one point sustained 13 sardine factories within the city limits. Over time, the fishing industry declined and the town went bankrupt. There is still an active fishing and shipping economy in Eastport, but it’s much less strong than it once was. Eastport’s population has been falling more or less steadily since 1900, both from people moving away and passing away—the median age in Eastport is 55. In 2018, there were 4 births… and 11 deaths.
I hope I’ve shared enough about this town that it’s not surprising to learn that Eastport is beloved by the people who live there, but not very well known outside of Washington County. If you do know about Eastport and you don’t live in Maine, you most likely heard about it from Deborah and James Fallow. They’re writers who love Eastport and visited it multiple times while writing their book Our Towns, and they contributed multiple articles to The Atlantic about it over those years. One of those articles was all about the arts in Eastport. You see, a few decades ago it became apparent that Eastport had attracted quite a community of artists.
That’s where my connection to Eastport comes in. I didn’t grow up in this city, but in one of the many tiny towns dotted around Washington County with a few hundred residents each. However, I spent nearly every Saturday during my middle and high school years in Eastport as I played in the youth orchestra. My sister hung photographs in their gallery and we went there to see plays and independent films. Eastport is where the arts are in Washington County. That didn’t happen by accident. It’s been nurtured and grown over decades. And while an entire community of people helped and continue to help that be true, a surprising amount of credit can be given to one woman.
Greg: The Art Center is the product of many hands, but if there was one figure that was absolutely essential, essential, in its early years, that would be Joyce Weber.
Barb: Joyce Weber—
Chris: This was Joyce Weber—
Jean: And said, “you have to see Joyce Weber!”
Joyce is still an active part of the arts community in Eastport and has been on the board of the Eastport Arts Center since its founding in 1985. There’s no better person to explain how the Art Center started than Joyce herself.
Joyce: Okay, I was having a morning cup of coffee around my kitchen table, three of the artists around town. I don’t know who said it, but somebody said, there are no galleries in this town. Not anywhere was there a sign of art. Except we knew there were artists out there everywhere, working. So someone said, why don’t we open up a gallery downtown? So we called a meeting of possible artists who would be interested. There were about eight who showed up, and then we had a potluck dinner to invite more, and we had about 15 around the table so we knew we had something going here. And we got ourselves organized, found a place to rent downtown, improving the building greatly in lieu of rent because you could see through the corners where the walls came together, there were little cracks, you could see air. It needed a lot of work, this building did. So we called upon our spouses and other members of our family to go down and repair it. So we repaired the building and made it into a really nice space. That was how we got started. Our first show we had about 15… no there were only 8 of us that time. And every succeeding summer we would invite more artists who were interested in being part of a cooperative gallery. And went through all the throes of organizing and getting our 5013c and so forth. So that’s how we got started.
A very reasonable question at this point is “what is the Eastport Art Center, anyway?” Well, like Joyce said, it started as just a gallery—a way to bring together some of Eastport’s artists and share their art with the town at large. But today the Eastport Art Center is an umbrella organization covering 7 constituent groups, from visual arts to film to music to theater. It has a board of directors, four staff members, and its own dedicated building. How did a gallery become an expansive community center? Just as artists are unlikely to be contained to one medium, Eastport was not limited to just one type of artistic expression. Another community member who was with the Art Center from the beginning, Lou Esposito, explained to me how he was involved with some early theater:
Lou: I had done some stuff in high school and I just hadn’t—for some reason I had an itch to do a play. And I had a friend in town, a good friend, had a theater background who had the theater knowledge and expertise to sort of direct. So we did a show, it was a silly little comedy called Greater Tuna. It was done in the band room in the high school. It certainly wasn’t anywhere near the quality of production of, that they’re doing now, but it was a blast. And the community just came out in droves, and people still talk about it, it was a very funny show and it was very big cast. I think the town was just hungry for something like that. That was done in ‘88 I think, and then in ‘89 we reprised the play for a fundraiser. The Rotary Club sponsored us and produced that. Pretty much the same cast. And even before that, even before I arrived in town, the Rotary had done minstrel shows. There was a history of productions in Eastport forever. Long before me. So we had that little bit of history, Joyce Weber’s husband was in Greater Tuna. Of course she’s pretty heavily involved with the Art Center from inception.
Quinn: See, I told you Joyce Weber is everywhere. But what Lou says next is why Eastport has the theater that it does today, and why you’re listening to a podcast about this tiny city in rural Maine.
Lou: There was a lot of buzz about Cornerstone coming to town, so it was a pretty natural—it was just a year after we had done Greater Tuna, so it was a natural fit to want to be involved in it. You couldn’t live in Eastport without hearing about this thing that was about to happen.
Cornerstone Theater Company sounds like an impressive, well-established theater group. And it is! They’ve done countless incredible productions over the years. However, in 1990, Cornerstone Theater Company was just a group of recent college grads with bold ideas. They were traveling around the country, building productions in rural towns that had little or no theater beforehand. And out of all the towns in the Northeast, they chose to come to Eastport. I asked James Bundy, the former managing director of Cornerstone Theater and the current dean of Yale Drama School, why they chose Eastport.
James: So oftentimes, some of our best contacts were made through State Art Councils. So we would contact the state art council to try to find a community that might be interested in hosting Cornerstone. The basic premise was that whatever community we were going to work with had to provide a venue for us to use and housing for us to live in.
Joyce had a slightly different version of why they picked Eastport.
Joyce: Well I think they were--we were their thirteenth residency, and the only state in the country that they hadn’t really explored was the state of Maine. So they… I think, I can’t remember now, I think they called the Maine Arts Commission first to see if they could recommend a place for them. And they said we’ve been looking at a little community on the coast called Eastport. And the arts commission said oh you wouldn’t want to go there, there’s nothing there. It’s just a fishing, shipping town. And they knew immediately that was where they wanted to go because that’s what they were looking for, a place where there wasn’t theater. And it sounded like a real adventure, so.
It’s unclear whether The Maine Arts Commission specifically recommended Eastport or didn’t think it was a good option at first, but one way or another, Cornerstone heard about the town and were intrigued. Maybe it was the challenge of tackling theater in a town with a struggling economy and aging population. Maybe it was the practical consideration that Eastport had enough available housing for them to stay in, and a few theatrical productions in the city already. Maybe it just sounded like an adventure.
The members of Cornerstone Theater were about to discover a lot more than just a fishing town. Over the next few months the challenges that Eastport faces would be woven into the art they made there.
Joyce: What they would do, they would come to a community where they were going to have a residency and they would spend some time there. Until they became, had a good understanding of the community and the dynamics there. And then they would all sit down together with some members of the community that were interested in being involved, and select a piece that would deal with the issues of where they lived. So that the theater that they would be doing, and most of the places they went people had never done theater before, it would be a part of their life. It would be experiencing something that they really understood and make a lot more sense.
And most importantly, they would weave in the fabric of this full community. Eastport is not the only town that’s important to this story.
Joyce: “So when they came here, they realized right away--and this was back then, it’s changed considerably since then--the relationship between Eastport and Pleasant Point was not exactly friendly. So they felt it was important to bring along some people from Pleasant Point to be a part of this.”
David: “It seemed like it had a lot of…. a lot of interesting… I don’t want to say divisions. I guess there were subcommunities within the community, that it became very obvious that there were different kinds of people there, which is another thing that excited us.”
Setting the Stage returns in two weeks with more about the relationship between Eastport and the neighboring Native American reservation Pleasant Point, as well as how in the world Cornerstone managed to pull off a 40-person musical on the edge of the Earth.
Setting the Stage is written and produced by me, Quinn Rose. You heard interviews in this episode with Joyce Weber, Lou Esposito, James Bundy, Greg Biss, David Reiffel, Chris Grannis, and Barb Smith. Our music is “” by “” and our show art was designed by Allison Truj. You can find us on Twitter @setthestagefm for behind the scenes images and opportunities to get free stickers of our show art, on Tumblr @settingthestagepodcast for transcripts of every episode, and for everything at settingthestage.transistor.fm. If you liked this week’s episode, why not share it something you think would like it too? Thank you for listening, and keep an ear out for our next episode on February 14.
The tagline for Cornerstone Theater's Eastport residency is that they bridged the neighboring communities of Eastport and Pleasant Point with their production. In this episode, we dive into the history of this Passamaquoddy reservation and what happened when Cornerstone arrived in town.
Click to expand episode two transcription
The first tagline that I heard in relation to Cornerstone’s work in Eastport is that they came to a rural area of Maine and built a bridge made out of theater between the white and Native American communities. As you could probably guess, the full story is a little more complicated than the tagline.
Last episode we set the scene of Eastport, the rural Maine town with a struggling economy and a vibrant arts community that started to organize itself in the 1980s. In 1990, a group of those artists established a partnership with the Cornerstone Theater Company.
Cornerstone itself had only existed for a few years. It was founded in 1986 by director Bill Rauch and playwright Alison Carey. For the first five years, it traveled around the United States and completed 12 residencies in various towns across America. The entire ensemble was comprised of young, white, recent Harvard graduates. They were not theater majors because Harvard had no theater department at the time, but they were all involved in theater and were frustrated with the limited idea of “American theater” they were faced with in Boston.
I got the chance to talk to a few of members of Cornerstone Theater. One of them was David Reiffel, who was a founding member of the ensemble.
David: My name is David Reiffel. I am a--I write--I create music, words, and sounds for theater. I’m a sound designer, a composer, a playwright. I do all of those things. For Cornerstone I was the composer in residence and the sound designer. I joined Cornerstone in the very beginning. I guess we first started talking about it in 1985 and then in ‘86 we did our first--we went on the road for our first residency, which was in Newport News, Virginia. And I had… I had been an undergraduate at Harvard, and during that time I had worked with Alison Carey, who was an actor at the time. And she introduced me to Bill Rauch, he was looking for a composer to do a show of his, and she said “oh you should talk to David Reiffel.” And Bill and I eventually, we didn’t end up working on that show but we ended up working on a lot of shows during his undergraduate time. He was I think three or four years behind me, but I was hanging out in Cambridge and continuing to be active in the Harvard theatrical scene. So he and I did a lot of shows together during his undergraduate time and then when he started Cornerstone, he asked me to come aboard.
The residency in Eastport was actually Cornerstone’s twelfth residency. They had been to towns in Virginia, North Dakota, Texas, Florida, Kansas, Nevada, Oregon, Mississippi, and West Virginia. They adapted canonical texts written by Shakespeare to Brecht to fit the communities they resided in, changing the setting and weaving in regional slang contributed by the community members. I asked David why Cornerstone chose to come to Eastport.
David: Let me think. I know that we wanted to do something in the Northeast. We had… we usually decided based on a desire to go to particular regions, often it was a region people didn’t know very well. And I think Eastport was attractive not only because they had a theater there that we could use in the Masonic Hall, but that also it was a chance to work with the people at the Passamaquoddy Reservation, so that we could bring those communities together. And we had you know, worked with lots of different kinds of communities, and the idea of Eastport and its island communities and these two different communities coming together was a very exciting idea for us.
At the time that they arrived in Eastport, Cornerstone had recently received national attention for their staging of Romeo and Juliet in a Mississippi town that cast white people as the Capulets and black people as the Montagues. That’s another great headline—exciting social statements, bringing communities together, reaching across tension to create art. Reactions in the town itself were mixed. Some people claimed the production stirred up trouble where there was none, and pitted black and white people against each other. This stance somehow simultaneously existed alongside others stating that they were uncomfortable with the production because it depicted an interracial bedroom scene. Many articles and books have been written about and in relation to the residencies that Cornerstone did, especially the Mississippi production, but I bring it up here specifically to demonstrate that nothing is as simple as it seems from the outside. In Washington County all kinds of social differences exist, from visible geographic racial divides to the invisible-to-outsiders but omnipresent divides about who’s local and who’s not.
David: Well we did a scouting trip that a bunch of us--we had a couple of groups coming in and doing scouting trips to meet people. It was beautiful, for one thing, that’s the first thing that we noticed. It seemed like it had a lot of…. a lot of interesting… I don’t want to say divisions. There were subcommunities within the community, that it became very obvious that there were different kinds of people there, which is another thing that excited us. There were the people who were from away and the people who had been there all their lives.
David: We had… I think it--because the--I may have the history wrong, but I think that the art center, which had already taken over--there was that part, I guess it was the art gallery section that was in the back of the building if I remember correctly… Was kind of a “from away” project, or that’s the impression that I had. And they were our first contact. I mean maybe I think it was a class thing, they were the better off people who contacted us first. And we… but as we worked there and got to know people better, it was reaching across those lines and having the piece be partially about those lines. That those lines really inform the adaptation that we did, which was of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. That was definitely at the center of the project that we were doing.
I also interviewed James Bundy, former managing director of Cornerstone Theater. Fair warning: the audio quality in these interview clips is not great, but what he has to say is incredibly interesting, so I hope you bear with it.
James: I was--I had been to college with the founders of Cornerstone, although we were not in the same year, we were at Harvard around the same time. And I became aware of the company because one of my teachers, Joanne Green, kept [something] at the time. So I heard about what Cornerstone was doing and I became a supporter and I joined their board for--I joined the board of trustees. And then I was invited by the company to interview to be their managing director, and at the time I was a professional actor but I was interested in doing other things in the theater besides acting, and so I joined the company in the spring of 1989.
I asked James about what he observed in terms of the issues facing the communities of Eastport and Pleasant Point.
James: Well I think at the heart of what was learned about Washington County was that it was, in terms of reported income, one of the two poorest counties in the United States. And we learned that young people in Eastport grow up with the sense that if they want to be able to learn a living in America, they have to leave the town in which they were raised. I think, you know, Cornerstone before I joined the company--Cornerstone had worked on a reservation in Shures, Nevada, and so we had had experience working with Native American people and I think that helped us. I don’t think we were always--we were always learning. Every community we ever went to, we were always learning what the local customs were and what the local issues were. And we were at pain, I think, to have the work that we did on stage represent the culture of the community in which we were making it. That’s why we took the title of Peer Gynt, which is how you might produce it if you were doing a Norwegian production, and turned it into Pier Gynt, and--I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the logo for the show, but it was a sardine can. And so I think our perception was--to get back to your question, I think our perception was that the issues that faced Eastport and the community and the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Pleasant Point were not unlike issues that people are dealing with in Native American communities and in the nation more broadly and have been ever since. So it didn’t strike us as particularly unusual, although there was obviously pain in some of the history.
We’ll come back to the adaptation of Pier Gynt next episode, but first we have to talk about what motivated the adaptation in the first place. And for that we need to talk about that “pain in the history.” The point of this production was supposed to be about the bridging of cultures. That’s not a simple idea anywhere, and it certainly isn’t simple in Washington County, Maine.
The Passamaquoddy people have been in the region that’s now known as Maine and New Brunswick for longer than written history. Its history is closely tied to Maine’s other tribe, the Penobscot—both groups speak closely related Algonquian languages. Previously to colonization they did not organize themselves as tribes, but were identified as such by the English based on geographical location.
The Passamaquoddy people were a traditionally migratory tribe around what is now the Maine and New Brunswick coast. They followed animal and fish migrations through the seasons. They have a deep canoeing tradition, and today members of the tribe will craft canoes to celebrate their art and history.
The Passamaquoddy had early contact with the Europeans that colonized America, primarily the French and English, starting with Samuel de Champlain’s settlement of the area of 1604. That expedition was relatively friendly, but things quickly took a turn when Henry Hudson looted a village by the Penobscot River in 1609, which was followed by a pandemic that wiped out 75% of the New England coastal population. The next few decades saw the surviving population trading with the English and French and thus getting involved in the devastating Beaver Wars in the mid 1600s, which concluded just in time for the English to turn against the Algonquian peoples.
The Passamaquoddies did manage to hold on to most of their autonomy and land until 1760, when the English started claiming their land after the Seven Years’ War, and then continued stealing more land at several points over the next several decades. This led into the legislation from Duncan Scott in the early 1900s that required Native American children to attend schools that actively worked to destroy their language and culture.
The Passamaquoddies have been sending a non-voting representative to the Maine state legislature since 1842, but they were not able to vote until 1954. It wasn’t until 1965 that the Department of Indian Affairs was created to address Native American specific concerns. Things started to turn around a little bit in 1980, when the tribe successfully earned a $81.5 million settlement after suing on the basis that the land taken from them by Massachusetts and Maine violated the Indian Nonintercourse Act of 1790. The court reward allowed them to invest in tribal land and businesses.
So what does the bridging of cultures look like, coming after that history? I’ll come back to theater and Cornerstone soon, but to get a better perspective on the contemporary situation, I talked to someone who lives and works on this bridge.
Now I’ve referenced the state of the Malecite-Passamaquoddy language multiple times over this very brief overview of the Passamaquoddy. It’s obvious that language is an essential part of culture and history, which is why it was deliberately oppressed in an attempt to suppress this culture. Today there are only around 500 speakers. In an effort to reverse that tide, there are initiatives to teach the language in Reservation schools, as well as in certain regional high schools.
Lynn: My name is Lynn Mitchell. I am a member of the Passamaquoddy tribe down in Sipayik in downeast Maine. I’ve worked for Maine Indian Education, the superintendent’s office, for 31 years. But for the past three years, I’ve started teaching the passamaquoddy culture language over at the Calais High School every other morning.
Quinn: So how many students do you have?
Lynn: I have… well I capped the class off because I didn’t want it to get too big, because I’ve done Girl Scouts and you know what I mean? So fourteen is what I take. In the beginning I started with twelve but then I opened it to fourteen. And usually--and they’re grades nine through twelve, and there’s a mixture of both Native and non-Native students. So we of course have two reservations and they’re both Passamaquoddy, one at Pleasant Point, Sipayik, and another one at Indian Township, Motahkomikuk, and so pretty much half the students come--like I said, half Native, half non Native attend the class.
Quinn: Is it all intro level, or is it mixed level?
Lynn: It’s all intro level. Every other year I teach 1 and 2. So this year i will be teaching 1 and 2, so that the kids can their credit for college.
Quinn: So do you know why Calais High School decided to add this language?
Lynn: I think it was Jay Skriletz, I don’t know if you’re aware of him? Mano y Mano, I know that he had a fund, a grant, that paid for this to make it happen. And he wanted it at all the high schools in the area, but the funding--reached out but what also happened three years ago was the reservation also received a huge grant for language immersion. So all those teachers who would have been teaching in the high school were focusing on the little little kids. Preschool kids. And I think they get some kindergarten that would come to them for like half a day and then they go back to the elementary school. So they were all busy in the immersion program. So he showed up here one day and said “hey Lynn, how would you feel about teaching?” And I was like maybe I want to do this when I’m older—of course I’m 52. But he said you know you’d be with another speaker, an elder. And I said sure, I’d be able to do that. And so things happened and there was no other--no one else to come in my class with me. He said, “well can you still do it?” And I was like, you know when you’re a baby, you don’t just get up and start running--well they say some kids do--but you have to start with the basics. So that’s what I did, and that’s what I do.
Quinn: So what does it mean to you, especially as someone who was not directly teaching this language until recently, what does it mean to you to be teaching this to a new generation?
Lynn: Oh my god, my roots are going further into the ground. It’s like… I don’t mean to cry but--it’s something I should have done, wish I could have done my whole life. You know what I mean? It’s like--because you don’t realize until something’s gone, or it’s on the verge of extinction. And the language, it defines us of who we are. It defines us. And the people, the kids that come and take the class, you know what I mean? They just love the class, and we have such a good time. And they come out, and they have a good understanding, but we need to keep it going. And the elementary school has a class in the schools, and I get to talk to the teachers that are going to be working in our Indian schools at the beginning of the year, and that's my big push you know, you might not be Native but attend this class with your kids, learn what you can, because you are going to help us make it happen. And keep the language alive.
Quinn: Thank you for sharing that.
Lynn: It’s huge, it’s… it’s just huge. It’s just getting the kids involved, because I know the kids at home, it’s like--you know when you’re a teenager, yeah it’s our language, you know what I mean? And I know even one boy had told his grandmother, she’s like are you taking the class? And he’s like no, it’s a dying language. Broke his mother’s heart! And he said he signed up for my class and his grandmother cried. So it ended up really good. Overall, I think we’ve come a long way, baby. You’re probably not old enough to know that phrase, but we’ve come a long way. Just having our presence, just being there, open and… It’s come around full face I think. There’s still--I don’t want to say little stinkers on both sides, because I tell you a few years ago I went to give blood at Baileyville and I walked in with my friend Cheryl, and someone swore profanity at us. “Blank Indians, go home,” I was like “Cheryl, I’m going to kick your butt when we get out of here.” But we still went in to give blood. Well I didn’t have enough iron, but she got to give blood and I waited. But you know what I mean, you just move on. But then I now there are people on our side, who are swearing at non-Natives. So there’s prejudice on both sides still, it’s there, but I think the more we keep working together, the more we’re like “hey.” It’s coming around.
Quinn: It’s coming around. There’s a lot at stake here in the question of what it means to bridge these communities, even more so 30 years ago. And that takes us back to 1990—just 36 years after the Passamaquoddies of Pleasant Point were granted the right to vote.
This is when a group of idealistic young theater students met the aging primarily-white population of Eastport and the rebuilding Passamaquoddy population of Pleasant Point. This is where everything—the racial history, the economic struggles, the concerns over who’s from here and who isn’t—this is where everything starts to become about theater.
The Cornerstone company had established a connection in the area, had access to a local theater space, and were now staying in Eastport. But how do you get people to join in your ambitious musical theater project? Apparently, by talking to everyone. This is part of the story that’s unwavering across everyone I talked to: they went to the coffeeshops, they went to the bars, and they went to the churches.
I heard it from Lou Esposito, who was part of the theater scene before Cornerstone even arrived:
Lou: It was summertime, and these—I guess there were maybe 8, these young Harvard grads, not your typical demographic for Eastport, but there was a lot of energy and they infiltrated the town. They went to all the churches, they did little coffee shops, and put on little skits. They got a lot of buzz, a lot of excitement going within the community to kind of build on what had happened up until that point. It was important to them to be really inclusive, they had a big effort at Pleasant Point and all that sort of thing, to recruit and just to get people interested in being part of what they were doing.
I heard it from Greg Biss, who has been deeply involved in Eastport music for decades:
Greg: Well they tried--they very consciously tried to interact with as many local people as they could. And they were particularly interested in doing that at the reservation. As a result, there was a very good Indian participation in that endeavor. Something that we’ve been trying to build on at the Art Center with varying success. They were quite successful about it. And you know, they made it a… they not only went to bars and whatever parties they could get themselves invited to, but they went to church. I think to meet people, the impression I had was that they were not regular churchgoers themselves, but they understood that there was a contingent of Eastporters that did so and they were trying to get in touch with those people as well. So they really quite clearly and specifically went out of there way to interact with people in whatever ways they could devise to do so. That was kind of a remarkable, I think, aspect of their presence here.
And I heard about it from the guiding force of the Eastport arts community, Joyce Weber:
Joyce: Let’s see they arrived on a Saturday night, and what they did, the thirteen of them spread out throughout the town and the community and go to all the bars and restaurants and wherever they could talk with people. They went over to Pleasant Point and talked to people there. And then on Sunday morning they went to all the churches. James… can’t think of his last name… James, whatever his last name is, stood up in church--my church--and made a nice speech about the theater coming and everybody was very polite and nice. And I thought that was very nice that they were doing this, but I thought no one’s going to respond to this kind of stuff. Well they scheduled interviews with people and meeting people at 3:00 Sunday afternoon. Eighty people showed up! I couldn’t believe it! We opened up the Masonic Hall there and they were streaming out the streets. I could believe it, it was a miracle. Partly because each member of the Cornerstone theater was so personable. And they loved what they were doing so much, and they were young and excited about this project. People just really responded to that. So they interviewed people all Sunday afternoon and took their names and ways to get in touch with them. That’s where it was from there. Then they began to have organizational meetings. So the people in town were involved with it right from the beginning, it wasn’t Cornerstone coming here and just plunking us with a theater. It was our theater. We were a part of it right from the get-go. It was a great way to organize it and make it happen.
There are so many ways to measure the success of this production. It is all about that initial tagline, bringing the cultures of two communities onto one stage? It is about expressing social issues through theater, and resonating with a community? Is it teaching a community to carry on with that work and create sustainable art?
Next episode we’ll be tackling the idea of what the goals of Cornerstone’s work in Eastport and across the county were, and how they did or didn’t reach them. Setting the Stage returns in two weeks with more about the Pier Gynt production, and more importantly, what happened once the curtain went down.
Setting the Stage is written and produced by me, Quinn Rose. You heard interviews in this episode with David Reiffel, James Bundy, Lynn Mitchell, Lou Esposito, Greg Biss, and Joyce Weber. Our music is Fireflies and Stardust from incompetech.com and our show art was designed by Allison Truj. You can find us on Twitter @setthestagefm for behind the scenes images and opportunities to get free stickers of our show art, on Tumblr @settingthestagepodcast for transcripts of every episode, and for everything at settingthestage.transistor.fm.
Thank you for listening, and keep an ear out for our next episode on February 28.
When you’re trying to put on a five-act play from 1867 in a tiny island town that’s never had a full theater program before, what does it mean to succeed?
Click to expand episode three transcription
When you’re trying to put on a five-act play from 1867 in a tiny island town that’s never had a full theater program before, what does it mean to succeed? Is getting up the show enough? Or is it about the deeper goals: connecting with a community, bringing different people together, creating sustainable art?
This is episode 3 of Setting the Stage. If you haven’t heard episodes 1 and 2 yet, I recommend listening to them first. You can catch up in less than an hour and continue on this story.
In the first two episodes we talked about Eastport, the rural Maine town with a struggling economy; Pleasant Point, the neighboring Native American reservation; and Cornerstone Theater, a group of young people traveling the country to build theater in rural areas. The players are all in place, so all that’s left is how these three groups came together to put on a show. In the end, what were Cornerstone’s goals in coming to Eastport, and did they meet them?
One we’ve already talked about: the idea of bridging two different communities through making theater together. But that wasn’t everything. James and David told me what their initial goals were as members of Cornerstone coming to Eastport and other rural areas.
David: When we first started, we all, you know, we all went to Harvard, we had great high falutin thoughts about how we were going to change American theater. This was before we conceived of Cornerstone, it’s kind of what you do, you think “oh I’m going to have a huge impact in the theater scene in America.” And we realized that we didn’t know what America really was. I mean we knew what New York theater was, we knew what Boston theater was, we knew what California theater was, but we didn’t know what America was. And so the initial idea was that we were going to go around and just perform all around the country and find out what theater would work in various places that weren’t New York, that weren’t the cosmopolitan--you know what’s in Chicago, what’s in Los Angeles. And then we came up with the idea of, if we were really committing to that, we would--and because we wanted to do big shows, we were all people who didn't want to do little four person kitchen sink plays, we wanted to do big plays. I think Bill and Alison came up with the idea of including people in the community as casts. And that’s how we came to the idea of residencies.
James: Move beyond more sort of traditional, institutionalized relationship of theaters to communities in which there’s a big theater, people you know, all the artists and all the managers and all the technicians are in the theater, and the audiences come to that theater and then leave that theater. And I think we felt at that time that it was important for theaters to reach out and find audiences who wouldn't necessarily go to those larger, more institutional theaters, who might not have access to that kind of artistry. We were interested in learning more about the nation and also bringing together people from different communities to tell stories that had particular relevance to those communities. We were interested in finding out what the questions and concerns of a particular community were and how to embody those in theater.
Barbara Smith, an Eastport resident who’s been involved with the arts in Eastport for decades, had similar thoughts.
Barbara: Well their goals—well they were on this project, we were one stop on the project to go into communities that were, I guess you might call underserved, really connect with the people and the culture and create a production, a well known production, that they’ve just maybe tweaked in places. And I mean I think they did an excellent job of coming in and really going after what they wanted. The people, the involvement, getting to learn the history and the ways around here. And the production was very well attended, and had very good results. And then the fact that their other goal not only was doing this production for themselves and for us, but having us get so fired up that we wanted to go ahead and do our own.
That leads to two important question. One, how did Cornerstone build the production to be intertwined with the Eastport culture? And two, how did theater continue in Eastport after they left?
When Cornerstone did one of their rural residencies, they would adapt the script of an existing play to fit the culture and language of a community. For Eastport, they chose the Norwegian play Peer Gynt, but rewrote it to fit the fishing town as p-i-e-r Pier Gynt. I first asked James and David what aspects of the culture in Washington Country they observed to weave into their adaptation.
David: I believe that we had already decided to do the adaptation of Pier Gynt by the time we arrived. It was as you say, this is a nautical town--we usually had already chosen the script that we would work on by the time we arrived in the town. The process of doing the adaptation was usually a couple of weeks listening to people, going to story circles, going to bars, going to the churches and just talking with people. I sought out people who were musicians in town like Barbara Smith, people who knew what the sound world was of the town. And then we would sit at the computer, the bunch of us, and work on the script. This one was actually--we split off into groups because it was such a huge script--we split off into groups and people would work on particular sections of it. I remember that Jay Skriletz and Peter Howard worked on the lyrics for the three--there are three women who are looking for trolls in the original, and they became three fisherwomen who were looking for mermen to sleep with. And Jay and Peter wrote these wonderful lyrics that had very specific references because Jay knew the area very well. He was from--I think he was either from Maine or he had moved to Maine, he had spent a lot of time there. He got very specific references that Mainers would get. That was the process and I went and listened to music at Pleasant Point. Deanna Francis sang me songs and got me in touch with people and sing me songs so I was able to bring that stuff into it. We had a bunch of really good musicians--it was one of the first times, one of the only times that I was able to work with a live band and that was very exciting. One way certainly that our eyes were opened was because we got very close with some people on the Passamaquoddy Reservation. Their relationship with Eastport, I think with lots of Native American tribes, the relationship with the outside world is very fraught. So that was specifically something that we were balancing, not always completely successfully. That we would come in with assumptions and with every white person good intention, and kind of, you know, be caught up short when people would say “no, that is not the way you want to approach this.” Which was an undercurrent that we didn’t really know about until we got there. That culture was much more a part of the adaptation, which was something that we didn’t go in planning because we didn’t really know that much about it but it guided our adaptation of the script, making Pier the mixed race child of a woman who lived in Pleasant Point completely changed the way that the adaptation went. And we had to find our way to how we were going to incorporate those two cultures together.
James: You know at the heart of what was learned about Washington County was that it was, in terms of reported income, one of the two poorest counties in the United States. Many young people in Eastport grow up with the sense that if they want to be able to learn a living in America, they have to leave the town in which they were raised. And kind of became a metaphor for that sense of longing and hope and fear about what a person’s future might be. And of course the thing about Pier is he actually doesn't manage it very well, he actually makes a huge number of mistakes. But then he finds a kind of forgiveness in the end, where Solveig forgives him and he somehow seems to perhaps forgive himself. It’s a very touching story that way.
Then I turned to the residents of Eastport to ask about their perspective on how the adaptation was done, starting with Barb Smith.
Barb: When they decided on the production—they did this around the country and in lots of other small communities, and what they liked to do is kind of figure out a real play that had been done and then kind of change it in such a way that it really reflected more of our community. And the play that they picked was Peer Gynt. And they kind of changed it a little bit and it became Pier Gynt, P-I-E-R, which of course we have piers in Eastport because we have a lot of water. And so there were, as I say, some adjustments. There was also musicians that came up with them, and songs were written specifically for this production. They spent a lot of time in the Eastport community as well as Pleasant Point, trying to drum up some interest in people working on this, whether they came in to help with the set, the stage, you know acting, music. And they got together quite a good sized group, ages—well, there were kids there, six, seven years old maybe, right up to older folks from both communities.
I also asked Joyce Weber, a pillar of the Eastport arts community.
Joyce: That was part of what they were trying to do here, part of their goals was to bring these two communities together, which they certainly did. And then they--after talking with some local people, they came up with a feeling for the issues here. Of course one of the issues was it was very difficult to make a living here. A lot of people if they graduated from high school would just leave, because there was nothing for them to do here. So they chose--and sometimes they would come back, they would come back because they missed Eastport a lot, once you live here for awhile you just can’t get it out of your system--they looked for a production they could do that would deal with these issues of having to leave home and go elsewhere to make a living and explore your life and make a life for yourself, but always wanting to come home. So Peer Gynt was the play that they chose, because that is about a man who left his home and traveled all over Europe, I guess. And finally returned. And it made that play that they put together… They used the actual lines of the play, but in a way that made it very understandable in terms of our community. And people really got it. I just couldn’t believe it. I never thought of this town as a theater town, but I think they had twelve performances and we just about sold out for every one. And people would be crying, local people, because it meant so much to them.
In the end, Pier Gynt was incredibly successful. Not only did Cornerstone manage to recruit dozens of people to act, sing, and work on the production, the community showed up in droves to watch the show. It was designed with fishing imagery that resonated deeply with a town that had always relied on the fishing industry. David wrote original music partially inspired by Native American culture, which was sung by people of different backgrounds and colors. They chose a play about leaving home, which was achingly familiar to a place that’s known as somewhere you can’t make a good living anymore. And beautifully, it’s a play about coming back home.
Joyce: Anyway, the final scene of the play, he had left, and she was there alone, and he was gone for several years and traveled Europe and everything. And then he decided he really wanted to go home, as much as he had been unhappy there before, he knew that was where we needed to be. And Solveig was always hoping, always waiting, loving him even though he had left her. And in the final scene Solveig was cleaning fish, because that was what people did. They worked on, in Eastport anyway, they ended up doing something with fish. And she was sitting there, cleaning, scraping the scales off the fish, and singing a sad song about how she missed him. And that was when he came in to the theater. And they went into each other’s arms and did this little dance around and sang a lovely song together. It was really nice, really nice. So it was about coming home.
While Pier Gynt was incredibly successful in Eastport and loved by many people who were involved, not everyone was in love with it. Lou Esposito had a few thoughts on the process of the adaptation, as well as how well Cornerstone equipped the Eastport community to keep making theater after they left.
Lou: I’m kind of a purist when it comes to the script. You know I don’t change, when I get involved with a play, I don’t change the script for any reason. It’s just not--who am I to think that I can do better than--and so I think rewriting a script, sort of dumbing it down so the audience can get it, I’m not really sure that’s necessary. I know that Cornerstone had a tradition of, before they came to Mississippi and they did Romeo and Juliet with a mixed race couple, they’re trying to make it so local people can get it. But people get it anyway if it’s done well. Who am I to rewrite Shakespeare, or Ibsen, or anybody else? I’m not really sure that’s necessary, but they’ve certainly been successful so it’s hard to argue with that. I guess there is that other point of view. It certainly, the result of it was, it moved along, it enhanced the process of what probably would have happened without them. It was an important step in things, and I think it was good for the community, but they mostly… Sort of the main characters, the main actors in this play were themselves, the Cornerstone folks. There wasn’t a lot of learning or technical learning beyond what you would get in being involved in any production. So that part of it was a little disappointing. But there were other positives as a result of them coming here, so it certainly was a good thing that they did.
The next thing I’m about to say is going to sound like a plot development from a movie, it’s just too convenient—but one of the primary reasons that Eastport was about to continue making regular theater after Cornerstone left is because Cornerstone didn’t entirely leave. They left someone behind.
Lou: That was the big benefit of the whole experience, was the momentum that had begun and Jay was there to lend the expertise. And also the continuity for many years, he was willing and able able to do that and spend the energy and time to get them off to a good start and set the bar pretty high, a lot of the things that were instituted in those days are still done even today, so a lot of credit to Jay and he probably… I don’t know who would have done that had he not been here, and he wouldn’t have been here without Cornerstone, so.
As a quick aside on Jay Skriletz—I’ve known him since I was 12. He did a few theater classes at my middle school, and I went to high school with his son. When I was a freshman he coached me in a poetry performance competition. I only learned about his connection to Cornerstone Theater when I started my research on this project and I was pretty blown away. And if the name sounds familiar to you too—we talked about him last episode. He was the man who was instrumental in getting the Passamaquoddy language taught in Calais High School. You may also recall a mention of him a few minutes ago too, when David was talking about a member of Cornerstone who used to live in Maine and so had insights on the slang and culture. Here’s Jay talking about his background and how we got here.
Jay: Well my connection with Cornerstone actually began in the late, middle 70s--I was helping my brother build his house and Dan Rather did a feature on Cornerstone, I think their first show, in Martha, Texas. Not sure about that. But I said “someday, I need to hook up with them.” And then I was living in Hoboken and they were doing a fundraiser in New York City, so I took my resume in. This was in 1978, maybe? 79? And they said come on. They were looking for interim tech director, so that’s the position I filled.
Quick note here: he missed a decade by accident, this was in the late 80s, not the late 70s.
Jay: We went to Washington DC and did a fundraiser, went to Boston and did a fundraiser, and the next residency was in Eastport, and I thought “oh that’s pretty interesting” because I had lived in Machiasport from 1975-1984. Cornerstone was in the process of moving away from rural residencies, which is what attracted me to it, into looking for a city to live in and do neighborhood residencies in different kinds of neighborhoods. Lots of discussion, lots of discussion, everything was done by consensus. And they picked Los Angeles, that’s my hometown, I had no interest in going back to Los Angeles, so that’s when I decided I’d just stay here.
And that brings us past Pier Gynt—but what about that first essential goal, the bridging of communities? Joyce commented on the involvement of members of Pleasant Point.
Joyce: Being a part of the play, all of those barriers kind of just fell away. And it was good because we got to know each other in a way that we never would have before. I’m not so sure that that has continued. I think we’ve to some extent we’re not as close as we were then, but it did make a difference in our community. And of course that was one of their goals, wherever they went, was to really have an impact on the community and do it through theater.
On one level, Cornerstone met all of its goals in Eastport. It brought together two different communities in one production. That show was immensely popular, recruiting about forty participants and enticing many more audience members. It was full of resonant messages and imagery that the people of Eastport loved. And this isn’t really about the success of the show, but it is kind of amazing--it was preserved with both video and audio recordings.
Female singer: I promise I’ll be waiting still / I can feel the snow before it falls / I can feel the leaves before…
[fades into]
Male singer: … Get up and dance / On the dance floor you might find your true romance / Shake a leg, get up and dance dance / Moving to a tune is too enchanting…
[fades away]
But what happened after the curtain went down?
Quinn: Did the members from Pleasant Point continue working with Stage East?
Barb: Certainly not to the extent that they did for Cornerstone. There were probably some people who appeared in productions, but I have to honestly say that we were not able to get the, as much representation there.
Greg: We at the Art Center would welcome a lot more Native participation. We’re not always sure how to arrange it.
So Stage East was formed, and theater continued in Eastport, but it didn’t take the Pleasant Point community along with it. And now that it’s been almost thirty years… Stage East is beginning to falter as well. Next episode, you’ll hear more from Brian Schuth, the president of Stage East, as well as many more community members about what’s happened to the theater group in recent years.
Brian: You know I talk about doing theater here, I try to tell people who I feel like don’t understand what a gift it is, not just to have a community theater, but to have a community theater in a place like this. The great thing about being out here is if you have an idea, and get some people to do it with you, nothing stands in your way. The flip side of that is, the reason for that is there’s often a gap here and there. There’s just only so many people out here. The core of the community gets smaller, older.
Chris: Stage East has been struggling for the past couple years to get enough people to put on a show.
Brian: And I think as time has gone by, it’s made it hard to continue to build the group, to get people excited to be part of it. And as that happens it begins to take on an identity a little bit apart from the community.
Jean: Well it’s just in shambles at the moment. It really is.
Brian: And one thing Cornerstone had--so the Cornerstone myth is inspiring, but it’s also kind of annoying some of the time. Because one thing Cornerstone had was a core of dedicated, talented, educated people whose only goal was to make theater happen in this place. And nobody has ever had that combination coming here.
[Americana music fades in]
How has the Eastport Art Center worked with the Pleasant Point community over the past three decades? And is there even hope of sustainable community theater in 2019? You can hear the conclusion of this story in our next episode.
Setting the Stage is written and produced by me, Quinn Rose. You heard interviews in this episode with David Reiffel, James Bundy, Barbara Smith, Greg Biss, Joyce Weber, Lou Esposito, Jay Skriletz, Brian Schuth, Chris Grannis, and Jean Wilhelm. Our music is Fireflies and Stardust from incompetech.com and our show art was designed by Allison Truj. You can find us on Twitter @setthestagefm or online at settingthestagepodcast.com, where there are transcripts of all the episodes. If you would like to get a free sticker of our beautiful show art, you can do that buy writing a review of us in Apple Podcasts and sending it to Setting the Stage on Twitter.
Thank you for listening, and keep an ear out for our last episode on March 14.
What happened to Stage East after Pier Gynt? In the conclusion to Setting the Stage, we dive into the arc of the last three decades of art and theater in Eastport.
Click to expand episode 4 transcription
[Americana music starts]
How does a theater company go from a stage full of forty people to a stage of just three, and what happen next? This is episode 4, and the conclusion of, Setting the Stage. If you haven’t heard the first 3 episodes, I recommend listening to them first. In episode 3, we talked about how Cornerstone Theater and the Eastport community produced an enormous show called Pier Gynt, which led to Eastport founding Stage East after Cornerstone left. I talked to Jay Skriletz, who came to Eastport with Cornerstone but stayed behind after they left, about the process of getting Stage East off the ground.
[Americana music fades out]
Jay: They left behind the theater with a minimal amount of lighting in it. I had helped Cornerstone--I knew where to buy used lighting and used dimming equipment, and stuff like that, I knew where to--so there was a nice little space. I put in a production, just as sort of a ground zero test. We did Waiting for Godot. Didn’t advertise it, and we found out, probably pretty obvious, people won’t just come because it’s Stage East in Eastport. There was no automatic audience from Pier Gynt. So then we did Playboy of the Western World, a real play. Local gentleman who had some theater experience and movie experience directed it. Added some music to it, and that was a success. The next show we did, we brought James Bundy back. And we brought him back to direct Fools, which was the first show that was actually done in the first space, because it was springtime and heating wasn’t an issue. And that sort of set the pattern. We did that in six weeks and it was quite successful, good performances. I think it became, it was always clear to me, but I think we all began to think that Stage East could grow better if it was dedicated to its audience rather than entertaining itself.
Stage East continued to be successful for quite some time. They were also closely connected to the Eastport Art Center, first through the physical space that they both shared, as Lou Esposito described:
Lou: Well again the momentum was there, the cast was big, they used a lot of local people, the energy was there, they--I think they left the town like 500 dollars as sort of seed money to get going. And so an organizational meeting was held—I was actually there—to form what would be the ongoing production company that didn’t have a name at the time. Jay was there, of course.
They did have, this was kind of cool—where Donny Sutherland had his pottery shop, the gallery had their space there and when you went to a play you actually walked through the gallery into the backdoor of the theater space. So it was a really nice experience for the audience. There was this sort of connection by space but not any kind of formal organization relationship.
Stage East then quickly became a constituent organization underneath the umbrella of the Eastport Art Center, a process that was overseen by Joyce Weber.
Joyce: We were called the Eastport Gallery and Art Center at the time. So that board met and decided we needed to establish a board just for the theater. So we named the theater Stage East and had our first organizational meeting that fall around October. We had some good advisors along the way, and that’s how it got started. It was a lot of work to do in the Masonic Hall, and we had a lot of volunteers. And we did come up with some money. There was a fellow, James… I’m sorry, I can’t remember his last name. I was standing in the space over there, and it was in shambles. We were planning to do their performance. And they had left, and left it with some bleachers I was standing there looking around and thinking how could we ever make a theater out of this? Because we had no money. And then wonderful fellow came walking up the stairs, and Jim said this is really interesting, tell me about it. And I said I was just standing there thinking about how will we ever come up with the money to turn this into a real, real theater? And he opened up his pocket and gave me a thousand dollars. It was so sweet of him! He said I believe you can do this, and I’d be glad to help you out.
However, performing in the Masonic Hall couldn’t last forever. Stage East eventually needed a new home that was larger and better fit the needs of a theater. Jean Wilhelm oversaw the transition from the former Masonic Hall to the former Baptist Church.
Jean: The guy that owned the brick building wanted to sell it, and we needed more space desperately anyway. And at that moment, the Baptist Church came up for sale because somebody had died and left them enough building that they could build a new little church they have out there. So presto bingo, everything began falling together, it was so miraculous. So David and I shook hands and came up with enough money to buy the Baptist Church, and I designed the theater and all that, and went down to Yale…. And thanks to my good friend Vicky Nolan down there, had a grand consultation with their technical director because I’ve never had to do anything as technical as all those pipes and things they have up there, and gave us all sorts of advice and people that we hired to come up and put all that stuff in, it was an enormous undertaking it really was. But it was a happy time. Somehow it all came together.
But not everything was smooth sailing. In the years following the initial founding of Stage East, Jay stayed as the primary director and teacher who guided the young theater group to professionalism and success. But his vision for Stage East ran in conflict with the rest of the board, so he eventually exited from his leadership position and focused on theater elsewhere. That’s about the time when Brian Schuth stumbled into the company.
Brian: So I got involved with Stage East… I didn’t really mean to. I first learned about Stage East—so in 1996, my wife and I were living outside Boston, we both met each other—I had just graduated from college, she was almost done with music school. And we got married, had kids right away, and we were living in Newton outside of Boston and couldn’t afford it anymore. And came here, and was kind of taken with the idea of being on the edge of nowhere. And it’s a beautiful place. Although we came down through Clark Street with mobile homes and everything, it wasn’t the most attractive thing, but I thought it was cool. And then that—I came back about a month later I think, actually thinking maybe I’ll look for a house, and there happened to be a play going on downtown, which kind of blew me away. That was—of all the romantic various ideas I had about living in this tiny little town, one of them was not that there would be a theater going on. And that was when I started thinking “yeah, maybe this’ll be an interesting place to live.” That following winter, the Bob Cratchit quit during A Christmas Carol and my wife had been asked to play music there, so she volunteered me to be Bob Cratchit. And then after that it was just like this falling downhill almost sort of thing. So I’m Bob Cratchit, after my third performance someone asked me if I might consider being on the board and I say yes. My first board meeting, somebody said “have you ever considered directing a play?” I said “not really, but maybe, I suppose.” So they said pick a play. So that fall I was directing The Tempest. And I forget when I actually became president, but at some point I became president and the rest is and remains history.
Quinn: Brian has been heavily involved with Stage East for decades, serving as the president and primary director for most of that time. He’s overseen great successes, but in recent years, no one has been able to stop the decline of Stage East.
Brian: So from the first time I got here--well let’s put it this way. I got asked to be in a play. Cold. No auditions or anything, it was already in rehearsal. And it wasn't a small part. So they were already looking for people. Now there were a lot of people in that play though, there were probably twenty people in that show. And then I got asked to be on the board, so again, it’s not like there was a waiting list. And then I got asked to direct. The great thing about being out here is if you have an idea, and get some people to do it with you, nothing stands in your way. The flip side of that is, the reason for that is there’s often a gap here and there. There’s just only so many people out here. It takes time and effort to put on a play. More than most people realize, I think. And we’re living in a time where--it’s kind of funny, Eastport, when I first moved to Eastport, the downtown was all boarded up, I remember walking there about nine months after we were here in the winter thinking “what have I done?” And it looks beautiful since then. But the core of the community gets smaller, older. And we see that directly related in, you know, as I run through my head of all the people who were directly involved in the first two years… half of them are dead, and the other half left. Just year by year, the company got smaller. And that led to disagreements about how to deal with that. You had me coming in, who was kind of discovering he loved theater, and kind of got drawn to--not necessarily the most crowd-pleasing material. But the stuff I thought would be most interesting to do. And I had the energy to do it. And that would sometimes would lead to conflict about what we would do or why we would choose to do that we were doing. But it really wasn’t so much conflict after awhile, it just became sort of burnout. In the space of ten years, I went from not having done anything since fifth grade to producing, acting, and directing in forty shows. Now I was an outlier, but there were plenty of people who were putting in other significant amounts of time, and I think we all kind of blew up at the same time. And one thing Cornerstone had--so the Cornerstone myth is inspiring, but it’s also kind of annoying some of the time. Because one thing Cornerstone had was a core of dedicated, talented, educated people whose only goal was to make theater happen in this place. And nobody has ever had that combination coming here. There are people with lots of energy, some people know what they’re doing and some people don’t but are willing to learn, but none of us have that focus. And I think as time has gone by, it’s made it hard to continue to build the group, to get people excited to be part of it. And as that happens it begins to take on an identity a little bit apart from the community.
Ann Skriletz, who has been involved in Stage East and also used to run the theater program at a local high school, had some thoughts about the downturn.
Ann: Yeah things seem to go in fits and starts with theater programs. Certainly that was our experience at the high school. We had huge shows, we did the Wizard of Oz, we did Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, we did the Fantasticks out there as well, we did Our Town. We did lots of big shows and then we would have some shrinkage, we’d have two or three kids who’d want to do a show the next time. And it was like that at Stage East as well. Sometimes it’s just sheer force of will. If you have people falling out of a show or whatever, you sometimes do whatever you have to do to get a show on the stage because you’ve already sold your tickets and your advertising and all that. There were a couple times that we ended up doing a show that we didn’t intend to act in. We picked a show that we could just go out and do it ourselves.
So where is Stage East going now? Although things look bleak at the moment, there’s a lot of hope for the future. Chris Grannis, director of the Eastport Art Center, commented on the current difficulties.
Chris: Stage East has been struggling for the past couple years to get enough people to put on a show. Whether it’s timing in people’s lives or the inspiration of the people in charge, or the director… somebody can come in with a lot of energy and whip up a show and it will be great, and sometimes it just doesn’t get the people involved and it’s hard to figure out why. People’s summers are very busy and there always seems to be a reason. But they don’t want to go away and we don’t want to go away, so we keep inciting shows. We keep trying, and there’s intention to keep going.
One major part of how they keep going is by being a part of the Eastport Art Center, which is absolutely thriving, with a yearlong calendar of arts performances, galleries, and workshops.
Chris: The Art Center is 7 constituent organizations under their umbrella. Three of them have their own 501c3s. So there’s an orchestra, the Passamaquoddy Bay Symphony Orchestra, there’s Stage East, and there’s Northern Lights Film Society. They’re all separate 501c3s. And then there’s the concert series, Eastport Gallery downtown, Eastport Strings, and Quoddy Voices. I think that’s seven. We help all these organizations do their thing in the arts. So we provide event space, we provide places to rehearse, advertising, insurance, just general support. And we invite artists from the community to express themselves here in many ways. There’s been shows come out of dancers in the community, artists who have only ever shown their artwork in their house have had shows here, so sky’s the limit really. We had hired an education and outreach coordinator to help with reaching out into the community educationally and other community organizations. She started doing— is Alison Brennan, retired music teacher from Calais, and she started our workshop program. So she puts on plans… probably six workshops a summer and several during the winter.
Alison: I work with area schools and I also plan and organize all the workshops that we have here. The workshops are either visual arts or music workshops. I also organize and work at the arts camps that we have for children. And for outreach, outreach at our center is really for all ages, from the earlier Kinderarts experiences to going to assisted living centers. And we have, some of our constituent groups have gone to the assisted living centers. Quoddy Voices and ensembles from the Passamaquoddy Bay Symphony Orchestra. We do have different people because, I think because the workshops are so varied, it attracts people from as far away as St. Andrews, New Brunswick to Jonesport, we’ve had people. Sometimes something just kind of clicks and they decide they want to travel all this way for a workshop. We even had one lady come from Bar Harbor once.
Quinn: So if the Art Center is doing so well, attracting people from hours away to take part in it, what will it take for Stage East to revitalize itself? Lou talked about keeping standards high, even with fewer people on board.
Lou: One thing they’ve always done from the earliest days, and again credit to Jay, is they’ve always set the bar pretty high. Even though we’re amateurs, it wasn’t amateurish. That was always important to me and so I hope they can maintain that, whatever direction it goes from here. I’d rather they just stop for awhile than do something that’s not very good. It’s always been sort of my mantra. Don’t just do it. I’ve talked to board members and they’ll bounce things off me because I’ve been around a long time doing this. Part of the allure of it is that they know--when I did a play with Jay, I knew you might not like the material, but it would be a good play. He put up a good quality product, same with Brian, and others. I’m pretty proud of these shows, I’ve directed a handful of shows myself, and I’ve seen some professional productions on some of the same plays I’ve done, and I feel like we’ve held our own and that’s important to me. If the thing is going to continue, and have the audience support, community support, advertisers and things, they need to stand for something. Better to take a break and gear up and do something good than just to throw something together just to say they’ve done a show.
Jean, as well as many other community members, is motivated by the idea of recruiting young people to make theater in Eastport.
Jean: But the thing I want to point out is we have forty eight, well fifty states. I think I can fairly say that there are at least two theaters in every single one of these states. And numerous training places. I mean every university just automatically has theater training now. All of these people are just pouring out, and what do they do? I just think it should be no problem at all to find a new director who’s coming out of one of those programs who doesn’t want to go to Broadway. I mean good lord, I worked in Broadway for awhile before it got so noisy and full, and I just wasn’t going to do it. It’s a horrible place. And we have something else to offer, and wonderful training in the process of working here. We’re going through a little switch about this. More young people are coming back. If they could come back to a job in the theater, I’m not the only person who never wanted to work in New York.
Everyone knows that Stage East has the space and the resources, it’s just about getting more people passionate and involved. And there is hope that things might be turning around.
Brian: Things are rough all over and I’m just trying to feel like if we can keep ourselves going, get a couple of shows up a year, maybe the tide will turn. We just have to wait and see. Actually, the fact that these people in Canada want to be in here, that’s a good sign. The fact that I know there are people in Machias who are young. And I mean really young, not like Washington County young, 40. People in their 20s want to be putting theater together makes me think, if we can just sort of, it’s our job right now to stay afloat, to keep some money in the bank, to make sure we continue to have this venue--really the only decent theatrical venue in Washington County--going, and we’ll see where we end up.
Right now Stage East is small, but it’s surviving. They don’t have the numbers to put on a big show, so instead they put on a three-person Neil Simon play called “You Ought to Be on Pictures” and attracted a large audience all the same. There is so much love for Stage East, even when not a lot is happening. People still know and love their roots in the Pier Gynt production, and are deeply proud of everything they’ve achieved since then. That idea is exemplified through the archival work that’s being done to preserve recordings of the original Pier Gynt production. I spoke to Meg McGarvey, who spearheaded the archival efforts.
Meg: Pier Gynt just was such an amazing occurrence, a happening to come to the community. And I learned some more about it later when I was, I think her name was Pat Donnelly, because I had the knowledge that they had filmed some of the performances. So I communicated with her and I think there another woman at Stage East—I mean Cornerstone. Just looking at it later through the archives they found a total of 14 DVDs that they had taken, filmed three performances and each performance from three angles. So this was a treasure of all this film. So I had a friend who was the president of the New England School of Communications over in Bangor, Tom Johnston, and so it was through him that--and they trusted me, they sent the box with all the tapes in it--and I turned it over to Tom, and he had, I think it was a graduate student who digitized the tapes. I think at that point they were 23 years old, and I guess at 25 years that’s when the tapes can start to really disintegrate. So they were good enough to digitize, and then we sent the tapes back to Cornerstone along with a CD or DVD of everything. And that was their only request, that they have a copy of the digitized version. They didn’t want any copyright or any royalties if we happened to do something with it. I thought they were just so cooperative, and they were so happy to have it in a digitized form. So that took years of trying to convince people that there had been films, and to reach that point where it was a reality and then Alberta Hunter kind of spearheaded the 25th anniversary celebration, and they took clips--the films, they were just more record shots, they weren’t all set up with individual microphones and all. So it could be blurry and the sound was--you couldn’t understand some of them, but just to see these people. There was a woman, Deanna Francis, who played Pier Gynt’s mother I think, and a Passamaquoddy woman, and she passed away a number of years ago, so to see her on stage--and I talked to one of her sisters who came to see that show, and it was so moving to make those connections. I guess they had the biggest turn out for the Pier Gynt casting, I think they told me they had 135 turn out, one of the biggest casting calls they had ever had. I think this was the last of this kind of production they did. I’ve seen some of the other people who were in the cast back then, so it really marked a gathering point in the community where the arts started to really take hold.
It’s hard to say what the future holds for Stage East. But for the Eastport Art Center, the future is undoubtedly bright. And I personally have faith that when something is supported by a thriving community organization, it has the foundation to come back around with that institutional support.
Brian: I’d like to think the trend is good. Not so much in Eastport right now, but in Machias there are a bunch of younger people who want to be doing theater, who are talking to me about what we can do. There’s a company in St. Andrews who’s gonna try to tour over here if we can’t at this moment in time necessarily have a core that can put on a bunch of shows, at least we still exist. Because of Stage East, the Eastport Art Center has the building it has right now. The Eastport Art Center before mostly used to be just a way to have insurance for the gallery, and they rented a building, and this leap to go to the building would not have happened if we hadn’t been there.
Even though growth is slow, there are active community recruitment efforts happening for Stage East.
Chris: Stage East did a play reading once a month in the winter months to try to get people past the door and on the stage just reading with the script in front of them. That seems to be a good way to get some people warmed to the idea of being on stage. So that’s worked a little bit but nobody’s really stuck, and they didn’t come to auditions. Well we’re trying our hardest to entice young people. We’ve heard several people move to Eastport and say they want to get involved in the Art Center, and indeed they have. We have new people all the time coming in here wanting to be involved. Stage East is wanting to get fresh out of college or university people that want to try their feet. Maybe they have a play in mind and they want to come and do an internship here and incite theater to happen, and use that energy to get more people in.
Also, even though the Art Center is doing well, they’re still focused on bringing in more people, to Stage East and to the arts in general.
Greg: Yeah, well we’re--one of the things that we have not been good at, but we’re getting better at, is keeping some kind of statistics about how many people we draw because our funders want to hear that. We want to also keep track. On a yearly basis, more than 5000 people come in the Art Center. Considerably more than 5000, probably more than 6000 now. And so you know, in a community of 1300 people, that’s a good number. We do wrestle with the fact that there are people who live in Washington County who have dimly heard of the Art Center but have never walked in our doors, and we want to do that without altering our standards or our mission in any way, but we want to encourage them to attend and that’s one of our goals.
A lot of people also expressed to me a desire to bring in more people from Pleasant Point specifically. I talked to Barb about the involvement of the residents of Pleasant Point in Stage East, and how much they continued to be involved in the Eastport arts community after Pier Gynt.
Barb: Certainly not to the extent that they did for Cornerstone. There were probably some people who appeared in productions, but I have to honestly say that we were not able to get the, as much representation there. Although they have, Pleasant Point folks have been involved in a lot of the Art Center activities, coming in and discussing their arts, or making their music, and telling stories.
It would be great to say that Cornerstone Theater came to Eastport, bridged two communities, and left a highly successful theater company in its wake. Right now, we can’t say that. But we can say that Pier Gynt started a legacy of theater that’s continued for three decades, even if its numbers are a little questionable right now. We can say it created friendships and relationships across people who would not have known each other otherwise, and tied the artistic history of the two towns together. And just as Stage East continues to create theater, it continues to improve and reach out to the Pleasant Point community. In 2017, visiting fellow Naphtali Fields produced August: Osage County to great success, and brought in involvement from members of the Passamaquoddy Tribe. This isn’t a clean story with a perfectly tied up happy ending. But it is a true story, of people who are trying to create art, and share that art with the community they love.
And what’s happened with Cornerstone in the last 30 years? They moved to Los Angeles and they continue their community-based theater work to this day. Cornerstone members have done some extraordinary things in and out of the company. But as excellent as Cornerstone is, this is not a podcast about Cornerstone. It’s a podcast about a rural island town and community theater. Too often, community theater is seen as synonymous with bad theater. But as Lou put it earlier, just because they’re amateurs doesn’t mean they’re amateurish. Community theater can be smart, and well-produced, and powerful. And even if it wasn’t, it would still be important.
Jay: I think every theater should have a theater, every town needs a theater, every town needs a place to talk about stuff in a meaningful way. And I think theater’s probably the most meaningful way to talk about stuff.
Lou: It certainly has been a hugely satisfying thing in my life for all these years. I can’t imagine life without it.
Jean: I think theater is one of the basic arts, and partly because it encompasses all the arts. One way or another it does. It’s such a rich exposition of humanity. Sometimes it’s just fun, ha ha ha, but I think that’s a lesser variety of theater, but that’s one of the great things about theater--it comes in so many forms and shapes and taken all together it really provides quite a view of the world and life. It’s a fantastic art. Once you get involved with it, it becomes an enormous joy to be part of it and participating in all these sides of the world.
James: There are a couple of essential challenges to being human. One of them is we can all see each other and inappropriate circumstances, touch each other. We are all real to each other and we all recognize each other’s reality. And at the same time we’re all abstract and mysterious to each other because none of us can ever fully know ourselves or the people around us. And so the theater seems to me to be a place where we get to embody that reality and abstraction and come to grips with it and find consolations and joys in that problem. Whether comic or tragic. But it’s an art form that requires us all to embrace our humanity and share it with each other in real time. And that’s what makes it miraculous, right? And why it will never go away.
More than anything, the arts are important to this town. To these people. Towards shaping the culture and community of the place they live, towards convincing the young people born here that it’s worth it to stay, towards keeping the arts alive in this rural town on the edge of the Earth.
Joyce: I think for starters it has drawn a lot of people here. There were artists sprinkled around everywhere here, out in the country, they weren’t organized or anything. And like I said a few of us artists got together and organized the gallery, that’s how we started getting organized. But once we moved into the Masonic Hall we were very visible, and we were making a difference in the town… And it’s established a certain reputation and a space in which art efforts can thrive. Because everything we did was beginning. Everything was new.
Greg: I think the arts are basic to life. We’re not the only art source in Washington County, but we’re a major one. We all feel that the arts should be made available to people, even in small rural areas. We try to do that. Because we think it’s--I mean I do it because I want to see this stuff, I want to hear this stuff, watch this stuff. It’s community based effort to make it available to people, including myself.
Chris: The art center is important first of all to the community, to bring arts of all sorts available for everybody, because it is, as Tara said the other nice, not the spice of life but the nutrition of life. It helps people learn, if they are having art involved with their learning process, so students should always have arts involved. The art center embellishes the life of the community greatly by all the concerts and workshops, I just don’t know how Eastport really could do as well without the art center. Maybe not as important to the world, but it’s important to this part of the world.
[Americana music fades in]
Meg: There are a lot of wonderful places we have yet to go, I feel like we’re just getting started.
Setting the Stage is written and produced by me, Quinn Rose. You heard interviews in this series with David Reiffel, James Bundy, Barbara Smith, Greg Biss, Joyce Weber, Lou Esposito, Jay Skriletz, Ann Skriletz, Meg McGarvey, Brian Schuth, Alison Brennan, Chris Grannis, Lynn Mitchell, and Jean Wilhelm. Our music is Fireflies and Stardust from incompetech.com and our show art was designed by Allison Truj. You can find us on Twitter @setthestagefm or online at settingthestagepodcast.com, where there are transcripts of all of the episodes. Thank you so much for listening to this series and supporting it. Take a minute to look up what community theater is happening near you. You never know what you might find.