by Paul Bass
New Haveners will take “revolutionary” walks through our history to help craft a new take on how our city developed and where it’s going next.
Those walks will take place Oct. 16-24 in a former factory building-turned-school on Blake Street.
The local A Broken Umbrella Theatre company will put on performances there of a play-in-progress called Revolutionary Haven: Myths of America. (Click here for details.)
The company isn’t inviting people just to show them a 40-minute play, during which patrons will walk from room to room to watch a story based on the challenges facing New Haven Loyalists and Patriots and those “caught in between” the conflict between the colonies and England between 1776 and 1779. Broken Umbrella is inviting people to help shape that play into a fuller, community-infused production.
In fact, even this version of the play is the result of community collaboration.
The theater company began with the basic idea of crafting a local production inspired by the nation’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
It invited people to “creation sessions,” said Director Rachel Alderman. City Historian Michael Morand attended the first, at her house. He told them about the story he has researched about a free Black landowner who helped build part of Yale, named Jethro Luke. Luke’s daughter Rose appears as a character in the play.
A Broken Umbrella also collaborated with middle schoolers it teaches at a summer program at Eli Whitney Museum. The students researched the period and put on their own play. Some of their ideas made it into this current draft of Revolutionary Haven, including a focus on Sybil Ludington, who like Paul Revere undertook a nighttime ride to warn about the coming of British Troops (but who unlike Revere didn’t have a famous poem written about it).
More community ideas flowed from a “session” the theater company held at the annual Westville ArtWalk.
This form of community-connected original local theater is not new for A Broken Umbrella. Since Rachel and Ian Alderman and friends formed the company in 2008, the company has taken a similar approach to staging plays about the invention of the bicycle, the former Diamond match stick factory (which was in the same Blake Street building where Revolutionary Haven is being staged), and New Haven apizza.
“We talk through time, through these layers of history, as we add our part of history to it,” Rachel Alderman said during a conversation Thursday about Revolutionary Haven and A Broken Umbrella, on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Click on the below video to watch the conversation. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to download the WNHH FM app.