Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends A Landscape of Remembrance and Reflection | Page 22

AMERICA PLAYS
By Robin Hazard Ray
Docent
ollowing on the success of The Nature
F Plays in the spring, Mount Auburn’s artistin-residence,
playwright Patrick Gabridge,
brought history to life in the autumn with The
America Plays.
As with the earlier play cycle, the five short
America Plays were performed at a series of
locations within the Cemetery. Gabridge and his
director, Courtney O’Connor, chose the sites for
their beauty, their historical significance, and their
proximity to the graves of famous or little-known
residents featured in the plays. The audience
followed guides from one site to the next through
the early autumn foliage.
As Gabridge wrote in his program note, “One of
the immense challenges of creating plays for this
Cemetery is that there is an overflowing trove of
compelling stories and interesting characters, some
well-known, others mostly invisible.” His challenge
was to choose from among this wealth a handful of
stories that would explore the depth and breadth of
American identity shown through stories of those
buried at Mount Auburn.
The first of the short plays, Man of Vision (1872),
positioned the audience between two icons of the
Cemetery: Bigelow Chapel and the Sphinx. Here
we met Cemetery founder Jacob Bigelow (played
by Ken Baltin) in the last stretch of his long life,
inspecting the work of Martin Milmore (Mathew
C. Ryan), the Irish-immigrant sculptor from whom
Bigelow commissioned the Sphinx as a memorial
to the fallen of the Civil War. The play touched not
only on Bigelow and his career in medicine and civic
leadership, but also on the tragic story of Milmore,
who died of complications from alcoholism not long
after completing the Sphinx.
With the actors posted along Cypress Avenue,
reciting poetry of Emily Dickinson and others about
Mount Auburn, the audience then processed toward the
Dell. Gabridge had excerpted a slice of the very lengthy
Consecration address, delivered to over a thousand people
in October 1831 by Cemetery co-founder Joseph Story
(Robert Najarian). The audience sat rapt as Najarian
circled the Dell Pond, speaking the while, demonstrating
the extraordinary acoustic and theatrical qualities of
the space, as Story had done before him, proclaiming,
“Mount Auburn, in the noblest sense, belongs no longer
to the living, but to the dead.” This dedication situated
the Cemetery and its Dead in the American context, as a
new kind of space in which to remember our history, both
personal and national.
The remaining plays brought life to women who
embodied the vitality of America. Some—like physician
Harriot Kezia Hunt (Karen MacDonald) and sculptor
Edmonia Lewis (Cheryl D. Singleton) in Variations on
an Unissued Apology—were native born, agitating for
recognition in a society hostile to their gender, race, or
both. Some—like actress Charlotte Cushman (Sarah
Newhouse), sculptor Harriet Hosmer (Amanda Collins),
and Edmonia Lewis (once again) in Rage Against the
Storm—left American shores to find personal and
professional liberty in Europe and in the arms of other
women. And some—members of the refugee Armenian
family in All the Broken Pieces—endured unspeakable
hardships before finding in America the refuge they had
long sought.
Audiences of all ages expressed their appreciation, in
applause, comments, and letters. Renata Del Vecchio, a
Medford High School student, whose class attended the
America Plays thanks to a Mass Humanities grant, wrote:
“Thank you so much for including stories of so many
minority people. I’ve never seen a conversation between 3
Queer women in history class.”
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