Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Modern Vision for an Historic Cemetery | Page 18

Playwriting in the
Cemetery:
Introducing
Artist-in-Residence
Patrick Gabridge
By Anna Moir, Grants & Communications Manager
The stories and landscape of Mount Auburn
Cemetery have long been a rich source of creative
inspiration. Our artist residency program, the first of
its kind at a historic cemetery in this country, has been
showcasing that creativity across a range of disciplines
in recent years, from multimedia exhibitions to music
composition. Award-winning playwright Patrick Gabridge
of Medford, MA, will bring in a new perspective as
the 2018–2019 Artist-in-Residence: the Cemetery as
inspiration for theater.
During his two-year residency, Patrick will be developing
a series of site-specific short plays, written to be produced
in carefully-selected locations across Mount Auburn. His
plays will portray different stories and themes from people
buried here, those who have worked here, and the nature
that can be found here. Patrick spent his early months in
Winter 2018 in research mode, digging through Mount
Auburn’s archives, exploring the landscape for inspiration,
and creating strategies for how performances could be staged
in different areas. He continues to explore and observe as
he writes his early drafts, remaining open to new ideas.
Based on his early research, Patrick reports that he
has discovered a wide array of potential topics with
which to experiment. Highlights include the spotted
salamanders of Consecration Dell; how Mount Auburn’s
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development related to the development of America’s
identity; founder Dr. Jacob Bigelow and the design of the
Sphinx monument; actors Edwin Booth and Charlotte
Cushman (“they’re just too interesting to pass up!”);
African-American monuments; the local Armenian com-
munity; Joseph Story’s consecration speech in 1831; Mount
Auburn’s early superintendents; and many more. The
Cemetery also offers unique opportunities for Patrick to
experiment artistically in ways he could not try elsewhere,
working with the light, vegetation, weather, and visual
palette of the landscape at different times of the day and
year. As a result, he expects that his final plays will include
both traditional narratives and ones that are more poetic or
non-linear in nature.
Creating plays that can be performed on the grounds
goes beyond finding an interesting story to turn into a
script, however; it is a complex job that Patrick does not
take lightly: “The tricky thing about writing site-specific
work is that I have to write plays about people, and
those plays need to be set in whatever spot they’re being
performed in for a reason: so, not just a random history
play.” When he has determined the location for a particular
subject, he then needs to make sure it is feasible to stage
a performance there. Accessibility, noise, and light are all
factors, as is the additional need—unique to an active
cemetery—to respect mourners, visitors, and individual
monuments. “Even though it seems like it’s a really big
place and you could perform anywhere,” he explains, “find-
ing the spaces where we can perform successfully, that are
tied to an interesting person or place or thing, and that also
have room for the audience, is actually more of a tricky
puzzle than it seems on the surface.”
Luckily, Patrick is no stranger to writing site-specific
plays for natural and historic locations. Previously he
worked with a theater company that performed in a series
of wild spaces and parking lots in Colorado, and his 2017
play “Blood on the Snow,” inspired by the Boston Massacre,
was presented at the Old State House. He has come to