I am Dead

No, that’s not actually true. I am not dead, I did not go method.

That would be make sense, when you’ve read The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters – and for the month of September, you are in rehearsals for an adaptation, The Spoon River Project, in which you play five different characters with their own personal monologue and the show goes up in under three weeks. I might as well be dead, or captured by pirates on Lake Michigan like Roscoe Purkapile!

It’s a beautiful play: the deceased citizens of Spoon River monologue Edgar Lee Masters’ poems to the audience about their lives, tragedies and scandals, memories and deaths. It’s a small cast so we all play many different characters – a German immigrant, a soldier going off to war, the village poetess…For the last not-even three weeks, I’ve been in rehearsals for this production – learning my monologues, the songs, dance numbers and getting the chance to work one on one with the playwright all for this weekend’s performances at the local cemetery.

It is a beautiful cemetery too. We are staging our play in the oldest part of the cemetery, with graves dating back to the early 1800’s. It is quiet here, with only the occasional church bell. Nobody comes to visit these graves anymore.

Except for this weekend, when the audience will walk down the path to reach their seats and wait for the cast to join them. For us to tell their stories of Lydia Puckett, George Grey, Doctor Meyers and Minerva Jones: “Will someone go to the village newspaper and gather into a book, the verse I wrote? I thirsted so for love! I hungered so for life!”

I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees. I am the College Theatre Dork and I speak for the dead and soon, vaginas too (The Vagina Monologues…a blog post coming to you).

“All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.”