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01/25/2023 07:00 AMFor years now, we have individually and collectively tried to make sense of how the pandemic has changed us and how it has changed the communities that sustain us. It can be hard to remember what the old normal was, how jarring and surreal the pandemic was at the onset (‘it’ll be just a few weeks!’ we thought), and how horrifying it was during the depths of the pandemic. That can make it hard to imagine what the new normal might look or feel like.
At the same time, all of that feels like it’s really important to consider before the recent past fades into faint memories and the rest of the future comes rushing towards us. And so, the prospect of seeing the second iteration of Julie Fitzpatrick’s creative work All the World’s A Stage: A Guilford (Pandemic) Love Story is enticing. It’s to be performed on Sunday, Feb. 12, at 4 p.m. at the First Congregational Church, 122 Broad Street, Guilford, as part of its Joyful Noise Series.
Billed as a “spoken-word community story full of heart, hope, and honesty” it will feature, in addition to Fitzpatrick as the poetic narrator, Stephanie Little Brown, Dana Canveri, Alice Chen, Victoria Newman, Meg Teape as performers, along with Christina Stevens with American Sign Language interpretation. Admittance will be first-come, first-served at the door, with free-will donations welcome and to be applied to the music program at First Church Guilford.
This second performance of this work follows its first during the Guilford Performing Arts Festival in 2021. The revised version is a bit shorter, and since it’s being performed indoors, it will be a bit easier to hear everything. Creating this revision of the story was both challenging and illuminating, says Fitzpatrick.
“So what have I learned? I have learned there is truth to the phrase, ‘this too shall pass.’ I felt very stuck during the pandemic when it came to creative output. Sometimes it’s very hard for me when I’m in the middle of a dark spot to realize that it will pass,” she says. “And I heard that throughout the pandemic. And I think people are trying to hold onto that in a lot of different ways. I don’t know that I really believed it. But as I revisit these stories, it gives me a lot of hope for the dark patches. Because we can hug again. I know that we are still living with COVID. But we can hug again, we are visiting with our friends, we are off Zoom more often than we are on it. You know, these are things that we can compare with what was our reality for what, two, two and a half years? So I think that was the biggest learning for me.”
Overlap In Our Experiences
Fitzpatrick is an actress and writer who is also a mom to Fitz, wife to Peter, and friend to many, someone who is firmly embedded in her community. A member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City, her most recent performances included Painting Churches at Drama Works Theatre in Old Saybrook, Peter and Wendy at Legacy Theatre in Branford, and in her own searing and thoughtful work 77 U-Turn at Legacy Theatre.
In addition to this revision of All the World’s A Stage: A Guilford (Pandemic) Love Story, Fitzpatrick is part of a playwriting group at Legacy and is writing another play. She is part of the Guilford Poet’s Guild and is working on a book of poems. She also directs, teaches, and acts with Legacy Theatre’s Wheel Life Theatre Troupe, with her son and actors who ambulate with crutches, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory devices, alongside their siblings and friends, all of them with different abilities.
She also is creating a curriculum for an adult acting class that will be offered through Legacy, one that is open to anyone, beginners or veterans with decades of experience, who wants to hone their ability to tell compelling, important stories and command the stage.
She found time recently to direct a community Christmas pageant and is working on a talent show for a local elementary school.
All of that work has reinforced what she says is a central element of the pandemic love story.
“We all know this at a high level about the human condition, that we all go through a lot of the same stuff. But there is something about a communal theatrical piece like this, or any kind of spoken-word piece that draws on over 70 people, or 200, or however many the pool is, that makes you realize how much overlap is running through all of our experiences. It offers me a great sense of connection to people,” she says.
On many levels, she says, it reinforces the importance —and beauty — of the seemingly simple act of talking and listening.
“There are so many stories in our community that are similar to one another’s,” she says, and so, in that sense, there is merit to some repetition in the story. At the same time, when she went through it again after the first performance, she found places where she could trim it. One thing that remains is the story’s reliance upon Shakespeare to help create a cohesive thread and, as Fitzpatrick puts it, “a segue helper” that helps the story travel from place to place.
She says her work with the Guilford Poet’s Guild has helped her appreciate the importance of succinctness, along with the fine art of hearing and being able to act upon constructive criticism, essential elements in any creative person’s arsenal.
“It helped me think, ‘do I need that line? Or have I already said it in another way?’ So that was a guiding element for me. I also found, as we performed it, that there were places where, as the narrator, I was falling out of the trajectory, so I took a look at that,” she says.
Her training in ensemble studio theater also helped. “So that was a melting pot of writers, directors, and actors, and you’d have playwrights give you a script on Tuesday that you would hear Tuesday night, and they would give you revisions on Wednesday, and then you’d hear that and do it again. So I was pretty used to, as an actor, watching writers trim,” she says
Developing A Gestural Vocabulary
Her work with the Wheel Life Theatre Troupe also has helped her hone her approach toward her work and her appreciation for the raw courage it can take to get up on stage to tell a story. She calls it a “theatrical exploration for storytellers who don’t often get to get up on stage.” Members of the group have stories to tell about their experiences, abilities, and disabilities. There are people in the group who live with cerebral palsy and spina bifida, people who use wheelchairs, crutches, legs, and arms to ambulate. So, in other words, people who are conventionally abled and differently abled, and often both.
The group’s work includes curating original monologues written by each of the members in a variety of life’s themes, tapping into the physical, the body, and gestural vocabulary.
Gestural vocabulary?
“And that has to do with how our bodies carry what we feel,” Fitzpatrick says. “You know we use our heads so much in our lives, but theater is really a full-body experience. As so, all of this is part of Wheel Life. It’s part improv. It’s part writers’ workshop. And it’s part acting.”
As participants share their monologues, the group starts to respond to the language with physical gesture and sound. So, if someone is talking about a hospital experience, someone else might come in with a “beep. beep. beep” background sound. If the performer describes wondering where the personnel is, someone in the group might start looking for the personnel, so the group is acting like something of a backup band with both sound and gesture.
“Emotions start to fly around the space because of that,” she says. “And each of the members have talked about the catharsis they get. Maybe not every time, but many times in those speeches and the communal movement around it, it’s been a neat thing.”
Fitzpatrick is consistently amazed by the honesty of these performers and performances and how what they create can convey so much more than mere facts. Fitzpatrick says the group is planning to showcase some of the work in March at Legacy.
Can We Have A Conversation?
She hopes the adult acting class, which is currently contemplated for April, will likewise help people understand and share their stories in a way that helps an audience to listen and understand. At this point, Fitzpatrick is thinking it will be a scene and monologue study. “That will be our main focus. And we will also be touching on stage presence. We’ll be working on memorization; we’ll be touching on stage fright,” she says. “These are all things I’ve studied over the years and that are essentially important for an intro class.”
While it is an intro class that welcomes rank beginners, Fitzpatrick also welcomes any seasoned actors who may want to cultivate beginner mind or re-explore the roots of their creative work. She plans to cap the group at about 10 or 12 people. This will be her first time teaching an adult acting class and she plans to tailor the curriculum to honor the needs and desires of the students.
“I’m pretty thrilled about it,” she says. “I’ve taken some wonderful classes. I think I have some great resources to share.
When she mentions resources to share, here’s what I want to know: how is she so incredibly productive when it comes to creative work? I say that sometimes it’s hard enough to create a decent dinner, let alone a play or a poem. How does she do it?
Well, as for dinner, she says, she leaves that up to her husband, who’s the expert in that. “I mean, I can make dinner, but it’s not going to be a good dinner,” she says. So, the first thing is to recognize your strengths and weaknesses and work as a team with others. Got it.
As for her work, she says being an early riser helps. Her alarm goes off around 4:50 a.m.;she’s usually out of bed by 5:15 a.m. Then she takes time to just simply get in touch with herself in the absence of distractions. She asks herself, “where am I best suited to give? What do I have to give? How can I give it.”
She considers what it is she wants to accomplish and creates assignments. As the day proceeds, she continues to work to keep extraneous distractions and random entertainment to a minimum. She is on social media, but maybe twice a week. She does enjoy watching shows, but only now and again with her family.
From experience, she knows how hard it can be to create in a vacuum, so she values the groups she works with, including the Guilford Poet’s Guild and the playwriting group at Legacy. She also cultivates the relationships she’s created over the years with theater people.
“It helps me to hear other people’s gears turning, not just mine,” she says. “We have to share with each other who we are and what we’re struggling with, what’s working, what’s not.”
And she’s willing to be there for others who might need someone to bounce around creative ideas. “If someone wants to, say, you know, if they have a creative idea, and they want to bounce it off of someone, tell them please feel free to email me and be like, ‘hey, you know, how’s this? Can we have a conversation about it?’ I would be happy to talk with someone about it,” she says. “Because I’m often in that place of needing a little fanning of the flames to get going.”
You can reach Fitzpatrick at julie@juliefitzpatrick.com. You can find out more about her work at juliefitzpatrick.com. Learn more about the Wheel Life Theatre Troupe (enrollment is ongoing) at legacytheatrect.org/wheel-life-theatre-troupe. Information about classes at Legacy are posted at legacytheatrect.org/classes.