Beautiful Star:
An Appalachian Nativity

FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT & DIRECTOR

One of the first things I learned about working in the professional regional theatre is that Christmas comes early. While everyone else is still thinking about what to wear for Halloween, I’ve spent most of the last ten Octobers of my life either in Victorian England with some guy named Scrooge or at Macy’s dressed up as an elf . And for the past three years, I’ve gotten to spend my holidays early with the fine folks at a small Church in a fictional town someplace in the mountains I am proud to call home.

I have been fascinated by the English Mystery Cycles since I first discovered them in 1995. My first attempt to adapt them for the Appalachian region was in a play called Wondrous Love. It was long and unwieldy, and after the first and only reading of the play, I thought I was through with the Mystery Cycle.

But the Mystery Plays, full of faith and majesty, have stayed with me. The language, rich with alliteration and surprisingly real, has shaped all my subsequent writing. But I knew I wanted to do more with them than simply re-stage them. I had to find a way to make the plays my own with a framework allowing us to know the people doing the plays. The church and the congregation I imagined was a fantasy of sorts. It was the church I would like to stumble into on a winter’s evening. A spirit filled place, where everyone, wounded somehow, can be healed. And where everyone is accepted, believer or not, into a family. It gives me great joy, year after year, to stumble into that church again, to find my old friends waiting, as joyous as ever with stories to tell. And to find this year, that there are some new friends as well as the play changes and grows in its third year.

Throughout the writing of the play, I thought a lot about my Aunt Shirley who decided in the mid-nineties that she would write and stage her own Christmas play in her basement. The cast was comprised of my family (all but me making their stage debut) and a few folks from her church. It was a three-year experiment in theatrical folk art. Every minute was crafted by Aunt Shirley with absolute love for the story she had to tell. And every year, there came a moment when the play transcended the basement of that 60s ranch house to become some bigger – something made out of faith. I imagine that moment happened sometimes too as the pageant wagons rolled through streets of medieval York and the fishmongers and shipwrights and carpenters performed their plays to celebrate their spirit. And it’s that moment I’ve come searching for again in this blending of Bible stories, medieval plays and contemporary Appalachia.

Preston Lane

 

FROM THE COMPOSER

I was raised in one of those families that kept the dictionary in the kitchen so we could use it to resolve suppertime disputes. You know the type. Fussing over spelling, nuances of meaning, Latin origins. In my family the Bible was in the kitchen, too, as a ready daily reference for whatever issue might arise. I’m still an avid dictionary reader, but I hadn’t dipped into the Bible for a while.

That is, not until Beautiful Star. For several sleepless weeks in the fall of 2006, I found myself again at the kitchen table with a Bible and a dictionary, this time a rhyming dictionary, trying to come up with new and original songs about some very well-known old stories. The Bible does not offer a lot of detail about the thoughts or emotions of its characters, and because thoughts and emotions are the stuff of good songs, I had to make that part up. I wondered what Sarah thought about Isaac heading up the mountain with Abraham. I wondered what Lucifer was thinking when he decided to turn against God. I wondered about the innkeeper that turned Mary and Joseph away. And I wondered what Mary, knowing all she knew about her son’s future, would sing to him as a lullaby.

The 2008 Beautiful Star Band is a homecoming of sorts – all three musicians have appeared in Triad Stage shows before. Bennett Sullivan, veteran of Beautiful Star 2006, has returned with his banjo, Stephie Coleman is back from the 2007 show with her old-time fiddle. And we are thrilled to have Kaleigh Malloy, the voice of “Poor Margaret” in last season’s Bloody Blackbeard, join the band with her mandolin. They are a talented and enthusiastic bunch and I am so glad to have them all back at Triad Stage again!

Laurelyn Dossett