By Sharon Groblicki, Standard Correspondent
“Ten November,” Artistree’s current production in rehearsal now at the Grange Theatre, promises to be another extraordinary piece of theater. It has an excellent cast, both local and from afar, finely tuned directing, and excellent music. We are blessed to have theater of this quality in our small corner of Vermont.
The play, written by Steven Dietz with music and lyrics by Eric Peltoniemi, is a musical drama based on the mysterious sinking of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald on Nov. 10, 1975, which killed all thirty aboard. The drama examines the many conflicting views of what happened that day, as the ship sank leaving no traces.
Based on Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the docudrama is an ensemble piece of the best kind, with music that sets the moods and enhances the storyline. Nine actors play multiple roles, and three female singers work together as individuals and as a single unit to seamlessly construct an epic work of theater. The play is a collage of monologues, cross-cutting drama, and radio broadcasts which Dietz has expertly woven together with lovely, poignant folk songs composed by Peltoniemi and beautifully sung by Jade Evangelista, Olivia Stanley, and Lavaune.
The ensemble, a collection of local actors and actors brought in for this play, is talented and versatile. Director Matthew Robert remarks that he has found the actors who are in our vicinity are like discovered treasure. Among them are Dan Patterson, Richard Noble, Stephanie Morgan, Phil Noble, John Emery, and Emma Lavaune.
Actors Emma Lavaune, Jade Evangelista, and Oliva Stanley find their places across the unfinished set. Courtesy of Artistree Community Arts Center
Patterson has lived in Hartland Four Corners since his retirement from the Theater Department of Keene State College, where he taught and directed for forty years. He was awarded two Kennedy Center Medallions for his work with the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and has a vast background of acting roles, both professional and with community theater. At the rehearsal I attended, I caught his monologue as the Alien Theorist.
Patterson’s performance was a masterpiece of timing, nuance, and complete immersion into the character. He commands our absolute attention as he attempts to convince us that the sinking of the ship was the work of the Occult or Aliens. He comes off not as a caricature or a crackpot, but as a reasonable man with a theory. “Things don’t just disappear” is a theme that is reiterated throughout the play, and when Patterson’s character states that and urges, “I am just asking you to listen to me,” we do. He says he just lets the material lead him when he is putting together a performance. “If the piece is well written, the character is there and will emerge. The thing is not trying to force it.” He says he very rarely has had a character that wouldn’t come. The key is to find it and not put in anything that isn’t there.
Emery is another of our local treasures. A fourth-year medical student at Dartmouth, he is also an excellent actor. The rehearsal I attended featured his role as the sailor, and he flawlessly maintained a Canadian accent along with his character’s military control of his emotions and belief that there were safety issues that should not have been overlooked. Emery was perfect for this role, as he both grew up on the Great Lakes and served as a submarine officer in the Navy. At one point, Director Matthew Robert had Emery demonstrate how to open a hatch cover so the character who had to pantomime it on stage could do it realistically.
Another local actor is Richard Noble, who had a history of excellent work with The Parish Players in their early years before moving away to his career as the Rare Materials Cataloger at Brown, where he continued his acting work with The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. He has returned to the area and the Parish Players, most recently appearing in “Rhinoceros.” Robert describes Noble’s work as dynamic, referencing the powerful first scene. This scene was not one of the ones I saw at the rehearsal I attended, so I asked Patterson to describe it:
“Richard is playing the captain of the Anderson, the ship that was following the Edmund Fitzgerald that day,” he relates. “There is a sense of immediacy in that scene. The Fitzgerald is getting lost and you hear it happening from radio broadcasts. There is an urgency that is quite palpable. You can hear that in Richard’s voice — the urgency and the pain of losing a friend.”
Morgan and Phil Noble are two of the other talented local actors — Morgan having begun her career doing high school musicals at Woodstock Union High School and Phil Noble having grown up in an acting family (His father is Richard Noble and his mother, Robyn, is also in theater). He was recently in the Parish Players’ “Rhinoceros” with his father. Morgan has appeared previously at the Grange Theatre in “God of Carnage” and “Loose Cannon.”
And then there are the trio of actors who were brought in for the occasion and who were all in The Grange Theatre’s last production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee:” Kevin Ilardi, Tyler Miranda, and Stanley. Ilardi was hilarious as the Boy Scout with the embarrassing adolescent moment; Miranda showed multifaceted talent as Mitch Mahoney, the Comfort Counselor who was an ex-con doing his community service; and Stanley was the swing who sang and danced expertly when she stepped in to play the over-achieving Marcy. They have assimilated themselves into the local theater scene, and the entire company blends as a resident company to create a magnificent theater piece.
Stanley sings in the trio with Evangelista and Lavaune. Lavaune, another of our local treasures, recently graduated from Dartmouth with a double major in Theater and Quantitative Social Sciences. She is an actress with many credits and has also served as Music Director and accompanist. (She says she still plays the piano to this day because she pinkie-promised Taylor Swift when she was six that she wouldn’t give it up.)
The third member of the trio, Evangelista, is also the Assistant Director, Stage Manager, and co-visionary with Robert and easily flows from role to role without missing a beat. They work seamlessly, having worked together in theater since they were 19.
Robert’s direction is visionary and real, and he is in connection with his actors at every moment. At this rehearsal, he was blocking a scene and he told the actors that this play “ebbs and flows like the ocean” and so the blocking of this scene had to reflect that quality. He tells the actors that they’ll try it the way he has envisioned it, but he is willing to wait and see if they feel comfortable with his vision. His blocking is also visually satisfying. When most people think of what a director does, they think more about helping their actors build their roles, but the aesthetic and visual power of good blocking is part of what makes a play successful.
He also makes suggestions that help his actors develop their characterizations, building upon what the actors bring to the role rather than trying to restructure their interpretations. Patterson says, “He listens. He really listens. That is a rare quality in a director.”
Patterson says that he is a real supporter of Robert’s and Evangelista’s vision. He speaks of Robert as “a Renaissance person,” then says, “They both are. Their vision really impresses me. They are creating theater that has relevance to humanity.” He speaks of their kindness and empathy and of their work with actors as patient and understanding. He also describes the work they are doing in blurring the lines of distinction between “professional” and community theater actors. Having literally written the book on directing community theater, he notes that “community theater actors,” i.e. those people who have day jobs or are retired, are doing it for no other reason than that they love it.
Lavaune talks of what Robert and Evangelista are doing here. “It’s the bridge between community and professional theater the industry is missing. As someone with both community and professional experience, this show is everything I love about both; it’s the freedom to create, explore, and build community with truly invested artists.”
So that is what is going on at the Grange Theatre right now. It’s pretty worthy stuff!
As for this show, it’s part of this year’s focus on Themes of Courage. There have been many other tragedies and many other ships sank in Lake Superior, but this one is particularly compelling, perhaps because it was so abrupt, but also because of the lore that surrounded it and the Gordon Lightfoot song.
“It very effectively reminds us of our humanity and how fragile life is. How arrogant we humans are with our technology and then we find that Mother Nature has other ideas.” The structure, Patterson notes, is part of the appeal. It takes a non-linear approach. It doesn’t just go from A to Z, but jumps from place to place.
Phil Noble says that it “seems like a pretty relevant play today with the degree to which our world still revolves around unregulated profit at the expense of everyday people. The play has a lot of salient lessons that we seem to keep unlearning again and again.”
“Ten November” runs from Nov. 8 through Nov. 17. For ticket information, please see artistreevt.org or contact Artistree’s Grange Theatre.
The wreck remains a mystery
Nearly fifty years after the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, the ship’s story remains as much a magnet for fascination and speculation as ever.
Measuring 729 feet from bow to stern, the ship was the largest vessel to sail the North American Great Lakes while it was active — and remains the largest to wreck there.
Even before embarking on her ill-fated Nov. 9, 1975, voyage, the ship had a significant following, especially among boat watchers. Beyond her impressive size, the ore carrier was uncommonly fast, regularly setting — and later breaking her own — seasonal haul records.
She also had a particularly colorful captain, Peter Pulcer, from 1966 to 1971. Known as the “DJ Captain,” Pulcer would blast music over the ship’s intercom at odd hours, give onshore tourists detailed descriptions of the boat as it sailed by, and generally entertain those he encountered.
In 1975, on what seemed like a routine run from Superior, Wisconsin, to Detroit, Michigan, the Edmund Fitzgerald encountered a brutal storm on Lake Superior. With winds nearing hurricane strength and waves towering up to 35 feet, the ship battled the elements for hours.
Around 7 p.m. on Nov. 10, captain Ernest McSorley radioed a nearby vessel: “I have a bad list, lost both radars. And I am taking heavy seas over the deck. One of the worst seas I’ve ever been in.”
Yet, just minutes later, at 7:10 p.m., he sent a calmer message: “We are holding our own.” It would be the ship’s final transmission.
Without a single distress call, the Edmund Fitzgerald vanished beneath the waves. By 7:30 p.m., when the skies cleared, the captain of the Arthur M. Anderson, a freighter trailing just ten miles behind, reported no trace of the ship.
The Coast Guard launched a swift search with a variety of vessels, helicopters, and planes. They found three empty lifeboats and eventually discovered the ship’s wreckage 535 feet below the surface, split in two.
Of the 29 crew members on board, no bodies were ever recovered.
The ship remains the most recent major boat to sink in the Great Lakes and the exact cause of its downfall remains unknown, two facts that each individually would have secured it some lasting notoriety on their own.
All the same, the disaster’s infamy was cemented due to its representation in the media created in its wake.
In particular, Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot immortalized the tragedy with his song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Lightfoot released the track a year after the disaster. The song skyrocketed to the top of the charts in Canada and the U.S. and was nominated for two Grammys.
Lightfoot’s lyrics tap into the mystery behind the boat’s sinkage, saying, “The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay if they’d put fifteen more miles behind ‘er. They might have split up or they might have capsized; they may have broke deep and took water.”
Written more than a decade after the boat sank, the play “Ten November” also plunges into the details of the shipwreck. Unlike Lightfoot’s song, which remains rooted in probable explanations, the play pokes some fun at the wide variety of theories surrounding the incident, walking through many of the possible explanations people have developed for the boat’s demise, some more probable than others.
Artistree’s directors Jade Evangelista and Matt Roberts selected “Ten November” in part due to its focus on the intrigue surrounding the ship’s disaster. “The mystery of its final moments, the rapid sinking, and the lingering questions about the wreck — especially after Gordon Lightfoot brought it to public attention — have turned it into an enduring legend,” Evangelista told the Standard.
The play also dives into themes of community, a focus the directors are eager to explore and aligns with Artistree’s seasonal theme: courage. “Ten November is a beautiful example of an ensemble docudrama about courage,” said Evangelista. “It honors the courage of the 1970s working class and offers a striking blend of music and drama rooted in the exploration of community.”