78th in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

Huzzas, high-fives, hugs, handshakes, and honkings are in order for dramatic elements of Touchstone Theatre’s 10-day festival this fall that occasioned a near record 77 posts here on Gadfly.

Well done!

“The Secret” — the play about Bethlehem-born poet H. D. — returns to Touchstone April 2-5.

Paul Willistein, “14th annual ABEs Salute Lehigh Valley Stage: From plays to musicals, theater unbound in 2019.” Bethlehem Press, January 3, 2020.

Producer: Touchstone Theatre. “Festival UnBound,” the multimedia project two years in the making, produced some 20 events and ran 10 days in October 2019. The festival took a measure of Bethlehem’s southside 20 years after Touchstone’s landmark “Steelbouund” production when SteelStacks was a twinkle in the Christmas City star. It was a big year for Touchstone Theatre, which also produced a terrific 20th production of “Christmas City Follies.”

Play: “The Secret,” Mock Turtle Marionette Theater. The world premiere about H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Bethlehem native and poet, during “Festival UnBound” was part of “Finding H.D., A Community Exploration of the Life and Work of Hilda Doolittle,” a year-long series of events organized by the Lehigh University English Department, Bethlehem Area Public Library, the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center and Mock Turtle Marionette Theatre. Doug Roysdon, Artistic Director, Mock Turtle Marionette Theater, was chief writer of the multimedia performance that mixes narrative, song, music, poetry, puppets and actors. Script collaborators were Jennie Gilrain, William Reichard-Flynn, Aidan Gilrain-McKenna, Matilda Snyder, Kalyani Singh and Seth Moglen.

Original Play: “Prometheus/Redux,” Touchstone Theatre. “Prometheus/Redux” was the astounding opening work of “Festival UnBound.” “Prometheus/Redux,” commissioned for “Festival UnBound,” is written by Gerald Stropnicky, a founding member of Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, and directed by Christopher Shorr, Touchstone ensemble member and director of theater at Moravian College. Music is by Harry Mann. Images and footage from the Steelworkers Archives are incorporated into the work as is an image of the implosion of Martin Tower, former Bethlehem Steel Corp. headquarters.

Ensemble, Play: “Prometheus/Redux,” Touchstone Theatre. Touchstone Theatre cofounder and ensemble member Bill George returned as Prometheus. It’s 20 years after he left The Steel and now, instead of being chained to the ladle, he is bound to a hospital bed, suffering liver failure. The cast included former steelworkers, a county judge and members of previous generations of the Touchstone ensemble.

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

72nd in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

Gadfly is still culling the treasures in his Festival UnBound files. So much there.

One of the things he was especially pleased with and impressed by during the Festival was the participation of our elected officials and City administrators. He said so during public comment at a Council meeting.

Councilman Reynolds chaired a panel. Councilwoman Van Wirt appeared on one that we just recently highlighted here with a video of her segment.

Darlene Heller was part of the Sustainability Forum that, unfortunately, he couldn’t attend.

Here Gadfly would like to call attention to the participation by Alicia Miller Karner, our Director of Community and Economic Development and Councilwoman Olga Negron.

These very short clips are especially welcome. If we get to hear City administrators speak, it’s usually about “business.” Ugh. Here we get to hear Alicia “as a person.” And CW Negron, well, she’s not one to speak overmuch at Council. She’s not one of those elected officials that Gadfly calls “wind demons.” So it’s good to hear her warm voice more as well.

The participation of all of these people indicates not only their personal commitment to the future of Bethlehem — the ambitious purpose of the Festival — but how that participation was valued by the festival organizers.

A tip o’ the hat!

Be sure to give a listen.

———–

Alicia Miller Karner, Director of Community and Economic Development

• “As a community we are continuing to rely on technology, on social media, on different ways of interacting . . . you have to put effort into coming out and interacting.”

• “The best is still yet to come.”

• “In my job, I spend a lot of time with those questions of how do we not leave them behind.”

• “[Responding to the question by another panelist: What am I going to do with my anger?] Honoring the anger stuck with me more.”

• “[Responding to a comment about lack of diversity in City Hall] Very male. Many times I am the only female in the room.”

Olga Negron, Bethlehem Councilwoman

• We hear that she once made a living sewing for the theater and the return to that in the Prometheus play “grounded” her again.

• “It’s up to us. It shouldn’t be up to the Mayor, it shouldn’t be up to the Administration, or even to us in City Council — it’s our community, and to me [the play is] a call to be involved, to be engaged.”

• “I’m always looking forward to listen to my emails, my phone calls, conversations . . . we cannot just sit down and watch, we have to be participants.”

• “We need to be more humble, learn to embrace, and, you know, encourage us to invite others that might not look like us or speak like us so that we can move forward in the community some of us might be wishing, dreaming of.”

Bravo!

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

71st in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

The Secret

The Secret begins one day, in late nineteenth century Bethlehem, when sixteen year-old, Helen Wolle, mother of H.D., entered a Moravian Seminary classroom to rehearse a song she looked forward to performing. Much to her shock and, in fact, trauma, she was roughly told to be quiet, to end “this dreadful noise” by her pastor grandfather, Papalie. And Helen, who loved to sing so much and so well, would never sing again in public. The focus of the panel will be on women in leadership. We will connect the panel to the play via a question that Mamalie (Hilda’s maternal grandmother) asks Hilda in the beginning of the play, and H.D. asks the audience at the end of the play: “Who will follow the music?” 

Gadfly is not done with showcasing the outstanding Bethlehem women who participated in the panel that followed a Festival Unbound performance of “The Secret,” the play about H. D.’s life. You will remember from our two previous installments here that moderator Jennie Gilrain gave the eight panelists about five minutes each to talk about their “dreams, hopes, works” and perhaps to recount a time when they were “encouraged or inspired or discouraged and oppressed from following your music.” Short biographies of these women can be found here.

Emily Santana, a woman from a modest household who dreamed of impossible things and, when accepted to college, was told by someone very, very close to her, “O, wow, I didn’t realize you would amount to something” — causing her to think about who decides your value, and about challenging expectations people have, not just of her, but any category of person, especially of our children.

Margaret Kavanagh –who has “a little job,” is “just a custodian” and doesn’t “know why I am here” — tells kids to be kind, help each other out, and if you can’t do random acts of kindness, “just don’t be a jerk.” Margaret  beats herself up sometimes but has an awesome therapist. Advice: be a positive influence on people around you.

to be continued . . .

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

69th in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

The Secret

The Secret begins one day, in late nineteenth century Bethlehem, when sixteen year-old, Helen Wolle, mother of H.D., entered a Moravian Seminary classroom to rehearse a song she looked forward to performing. Much to her shock and, in fact, trauma, she was roughly told to be quiet, to end “this dreadful noise.” by her pastor grandfather, Papalie. And Helen, who loved to sing so much and so well, would never sing again in public. The focus of the panel will be on women in leadership. We will connect the panel to the play via a question that Mamalie (Hilda’s maternal grandmother) asks Hilda in the beginning of the play, and H.D. asks the audience at the end of the play: “Who will follow the music?’ 

Gadfly loves the voices, the stories of our residents, and there was no better place to hear them than at the panels that followed Festival Unbound performances, such as after “The Secret,” the play about H. D.’s life.

Moderator Jennie Gilrain gave the eight panelists about five minutes each to talk about their “dreams, hopes, works” and perhaps recount a time when they were “encouraged or inspired or discouraged and oppressed from following your music.”

Here are the first two.

Abriana Ferrari, who’s been laughed at, told she is not smart enough, too innocent, too young to follow her music, that is, becoming an environmental lawyer with a desire to “help heal the scars that we are implanting on our planet.”

Mary C. Foltz talks of finding a group that enabled her to let go of shame and doubt when in college she was struggling with her sexual identity and how now she is most interested in institutional and structural change that will benefit women in our community having to do with reproductive justice: IVF,  adoption, childcare for low-paid workers, care for children in general.

to be continued . . .

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

68th in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia

“In the first two decades, the Moravians built a racially integrated city.”
(Seth Moglen)

When you hear “a Priest, a Rabbi, and a Minister walk into a bar,” prepare for a joke.

When you hear a Latino man, an African American woman, and a White woman are discussing diversity, prepare for an indictment.

Such happened in the middle of the panel discussion following the “Hidden Seed” performance during Touchstone Theatre’s Festival UnBound.

“Who’s sitting in the decision table?” asked LM, “if you don’t have the diversity in the decision table, it’s no diversity at all.” “Take, for example, the City Hall here in Bethlehem, ok,” followed AAW, “tell us about the diversity in City Hall [pause], there’s hardly any diversity in City Hall. . . . It’s all white most of the time. . . . So when you’re talking about how can we change our city, well, I think our City Hall needs to be reflective of the people, the composition should include the people of the community. . . . It is very, very, very Anglo.” “And very male,” adds WW, “many times I’m in the room, I’m the only female in the room in City Hall. . . . I get very tired having to explain that I think differently . . . I entertain ideas differently, and it’s almost that I got to justify. . . . It is absolutely an unconscious bias. . . . In the business community, in government, it’s a challenge.”

Short exchange, long in ramification.

Elections are on Gadfly’s mind today as you can see from the previous two posts.

Some random thoughts to chew on as we think about the role future elections play in furthering the goal of a more diverse city:

• Should diversity start at the top?
• What would a photo of the Mayor’s staff meeting show?
• Are we getting close to a woman mayor?
• We have three female councilpersons — a record number?
• Can we imagine more, even a totally female Council?
• We have Latino representation on Council — sufficient?
• Has there ever been an African American on Council?
• Has there ever been an African American running for Council?
• Does a range, a balance of race and gender and heritage in our elected officials matter?

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

67th in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia

Fireflies in the summer.

What a beautiful image.

Poetic, really.

What a horrible thought.

Apocalyptic, really.

Spoken by an African American Political Science professor almost at the end of the panel discussion after Festival UnBound’s play “Hidden Seed.”

In a very real sense the 10-day festival can be thought of as an orgy of good feeling. You couldn’t be on Payrow Plaza that last perfectly weathered night without experiencing the orgasmic release of (channeling Walt Whitman) long pent-up aching rivers of love for and empathy with our Bethlehem brothers and sisters. All our brothers and sisters. “Of every hue and caste am I,” Whitman chanted in his democratic ecstasy.

When our antic ringmaster proclaimed “We love you, Bethlehem!” we were one.

When we lit our candles on the parapet and peered into the City’s navel, we signed on to a kind of suicide mission.

By god, we are going to make this town a better place  — or else!

But 17 days past that almost cult-like charisma, a firm, sober voice from the “Hidden Seed” back row naggingly nips at Gadfly’s optimism like a speck in the eye or a pebble in a shoe.

• “I don’t know where we are.”
• “I thought we were further along on this path.”
• “I’m a political science professor.”
• “The last election and everything that’s happened since then has totally messed with how far along I thought we were.”
• “The path I thought we were moving along in the right direction as far as inclusion as far as accepting others.
• “And now I find that maybe a third to maybe forty percent of the people in this country have a very different idea than I do.”
• “What I got from this play was that there are these bursts , it seems, of activity, and maybe things don’t work out, and then maybe somewhere else there’s another burst, and maybe that’s the way it is.
• “And maybe you can’t really think of it as linear progression from bad to better.”
• “Maybe it’s just like, I don’t know, like fireflies in the summer, just be a light here and a light there.”
• “Maybe that’s the way it is.”

An African American who’s “lost.”

Progress — random, illusory.

Maybe the long arc of the universe doesn’t bend toward justice.

Maybe on that parapet we were just one more firefly burst briefly adorning the darkness.

Say it ain’t so.

Gadfly has to believe in progress, has to believe in the steady ascent of human kind from the brutal forms fighting over a water-hole in the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Has to believe that democracy is ever in the making.

The title of Lehigh professor Stephanie Powell Watts’ novel Nobody’s Going to Save Us was invoked many times during the festival.

Maybe what we will most need to save ourselves from is . . . our own doubt.

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

65th in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

Hidden Seed: Bethlehem’s Forgotten Utopia

Our Moravian history was a lot more complicated than the tourist guides let on.

Do you know about the Moravian massacre of Native Americans at Gnadenhutten?

Do you know that there were slaves in Bethlehem?

That’s the terrible knowledge that a ticket to Touchstone’s Festival UnBound play bought for us.

Three 18th century female Bethlehem ghosts — a formerly enslaved West African woman, a Native American woman, and one of the original Moravian immigrants from Europe — agree to tell everything, the whole story not just the happy parts, without lying.

This raising of History’s skirt, which Gadfly witnessed in Sisters House and characterized as a spiritual experience like going to Mass in the Catacombs, was the toughest of the Festival’s three dramatic events for him to bear.

Olga Negron found just the right words. “It took me hours to download,” she said, “It was heavy. My partner and I were driving home like quiet. We even went for a walk.”

“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” the poet says.

Walk it off, my racially comfortable Bethlehemites, if you can.

Given the disturbing nature of the core dramatic tension in the play, it was not surprising that the post-performance panel discussion was, for Gadfly, the most challenging.

Moderator Jennie Gilrain prepped panelists (Olga Negron, Javier Torres, Alicia Miller Karner, Winston Alozi, Berto, Stephanie Powell Watts, and the three actors) to pick and choose among three questions:

What kind(?) of equality and community do we want in the City of Bethlehem today?

What’s holding us back? What’s preventing us from cultivating more equality and community?

What can we learn from the experience of the City’s 18th century Founders explored in the play?

Following past practice, Gadfly offers you here the entire discussion, suggesting that you listen your way through first. And then we’ll come back and focus on and think about specific sections.

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

64th in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

This Moravian professor, whose name Gadfly doesn’t know, alerted us during discussion after Festival UnBound’s “Poets, Troubadours, and Troublemakers” of a partnership between Moravian and Touchstone Theatre.

MFA in Performance Creation

“The partnership between Moravian College and Touchstone Theatre creates a bridge between the College and the professional theatre, and between the College and our local community.”

Brand-new program that Gadfly knew nothing about: the first cohort of students began last August.

Touchstone, we know, specializes in “socially engaged performance creation and community-based work,” and this program with Moravian will enhance its people resources while spreading its mission.

Gadfly has always said that Touchstone Theatre is one of Bethlehem’s treasures. Now it will help train treasure-makers for other communities.

“I’m a college professor and a professional theatre artist. As a member of both the Touchstone Theatre company and the Moravian College faculty, I’ve been able to build a bridge between the two institutions that gives our students terrific opportunities. When college students take what they learn in the classroom and see it applied out in the world, it sinks in. We want to give them a head start, so that when they graduate they are to hit the ground running.”

–Christopher Shorr, Director of Theatre  

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

63rd in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

I hear we are speaking about history this morning.

• “The heritage of the Southside especially was that it was a wildly divergent population.”
• “So what you need to understand about Bethlehem is that it is founded by and large by an immigrant population.”
• From it’s very start it’s an immigrant population community, and it served and it fostered immigrant populations and divergent racial populations for its entire history.”
• “That is our heritage; that is our legacy.”
• “And this is a legacy that can continue to be developed in some strategic fashion.”
• “It’s hard for us to understand — there’s so many social, political, etc. problems that are facing us, but I will just say if history informs anything that we have a strong foundation to be able to address the issues that are facing us today.”
• “We can figure out a way to build on our strengths, which includes our history and our heritage.”

From the “Poets, Troubadours, and Troublemakers” event by a woman whom, unfortunately, Gadfly doesn’t know.

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

62nd in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

Speaking of history to celebrate as per the previous post about the good visitor from Allentown.

More fertile thoughts from the panel after Festival UnBound’s “Poets, Troubadours, and Troublemakers” event.

We have the National Museum of Industrial History, but Geoff Gehman sees a resource much more specific filling a void in historical knowledge about Bethlehem Steel and providing a valuable educational tool.

• “One of the things I’d like to see is a dedicated museum.”
• “Having a dedicated museum that talks about the Steel as a community that was integrated workwise and segregated socially.”
• “. . . integrate that into the curriculum of the schools.”
• “Not a bad way to start getting kids early and then hopefully influencing the parents and other generations too.”
• “I feel that there’s a huge void about the history of the Steel.”
• “It’s rich as hell.”

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten

61st in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre

One of Gadfly’s major heroes is Thoreau, you know, the guy who went to live in the woods (though the meaning of that “sojourn,” as he called it, is most often misunderstood).

Thoreau loved mornings.

“The Morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour . . . All intelligences awake with the morning.”

Gadfly loves Monday morning especially — new week, new beginning, rebirth.

Gadfly has three first-semester college grandchildren right now.

He writes them cheerleading emails every Monday morning, urging them to awake with the morning of the week and to do well.

Here’s a cheerleading Monday morning message for you.

From an Allentown visitor to Touchstone Theatre’s Festival UnBound “Prometheus / Redux” play.

• “As much as you need to know where you’re going, and that’s so important, I think to keep track of where you’ve been and what you’ve accomplished.”
• “You guys have it together.”
• “You give us art, you give us community.”
• “We in Allentown wonder why they can’t do it better.”
• “Bethlehem has history to celebrate; Allentown was a banking community.”
• “You can’t celebrate banking.”
• “We’re from Allentown . . . We always come to Bethlehem.”

Gadfly loves the voices of “real” people. That’s why he tries to amplify them so much in these pages.

Festival UnBound
Closed but never forgotten