Projecting Outward: Bess O'Brien and Teen Cast Take Their Show on the Road . . . Listen.

By Amy Lilly

Photo: Margaret Michniewicz

Bess O’Brien directs performers in rehearsal at Johnson State College.

 “That is so cool,” Rainey Lacey murmurs behind me during a recent rehearsal of the upcoming teen musical drama, The Voices Project. Lacey is one of the production designers; she is referring to the high-tech lighting – the use of computer projectors instead of spotlights – that has just been turned on the set, a segmented wall of trapezoidal white screens, creating a silhouette of the Green Mountains.

Her comment seems to sum up the mood of everyone on and around the stage, from the two girls rehearsing an anti-war scene together, to the three women co-directors jumping up alternately to give advice, to the members of the cast waiting in the wings for their scenes, arms around each other's waist.

 The Voices Project is a realistic depiction of teenagers' lives in Vermont today. The musical's material has been condensed from the original contributions of over a thousand teenagers from around the state. It is being performed by teens; the song lyrics and music have been written by teens; more teens collaborated on the script. “It's really creepy how close we all are to our characters," laughs nineteen-year-old Sophia Lapaglia, a graduate of U-32 High School currently at UVM, who plays the gregarious (but pill-popping) Sarah. The sense of excitement around this unique project is palpable. Jordan Mitchell-Love from Saxtons River, a recent graduate of Vermont Academy who plays the character Colby, puts it this way: “This is something that's only going to happen once.”

The genie behind the curtain is Bess O’Brien, who is almost hoarse by the time she dismisses the cast for dinner and leaves the stage at Johnson State College, site of the production's intense three-week rehearsal camp. O'Brien grew up in Middlebury and attended Middlebury Union High School. A graduate of Mt. Holyoke College (1981) in theater arts and a veteran of New York City theater, O'Brien had moved back to Vermont by 1988 and soon began working on film projects with director Jay Craven.

In 1991, O’Brien and Craven co-founded Kingdom County Productions, a non-profit media arts education organization aimed at raising awareness of Vermont's unique assets. Under the KCP aegis, O’Brien directed Here Today (2002), a documentary on heroin use in the Northeast Kingdom. With underwriting from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont (BCBS), she brought the film on tour around the state, showing it sixty-five times over the course of a year. The film had a measurable impact, O’Brien says, including the first methadone clinic in Burlington and Vermonters everywhere began confronting and talking openly about our heroin problem.

When Blue Cross approached her to do another project O’Brien proposed The Voices Project. It had taken shape during her tour of Here Today, when many families asked what teenagers wanted and needed in their communities. O’Brien thought, why not just ask them? For the vehicle, she chose her first love, theater. The project is a joint production of BCBS and Kingdom County, and continues KCP’s mission to make stories about Vermont.

O’Brien also had in mind a few examples of Theater for Social Change, a participatory type of theater that originated in the 1960s. She cites Runaways (1978) as her inspiration, a musical about homeless and runaway children on the streets of New York City, for which director Elizabeth Swados did her research on the street. Another, The Exonerated (2002), based on interviews with death row inmates who were innocent, helped raise awareness of death penalty issues. O’Brien hopes that The Voices Project will galvanize adults and teens around Vermont to talk more openly about their lives, and she plans to hold a series of public meetings after each performance as a way for people to discuss together what they can do in their own communities to involve teens. “I find that performance-oriented arts, which are dynamic, can bring people together in one room and give them something to talk about. I see theater as a kind of jumping-off place,” she says.

The amount of work O'Brien has put into this project is staggering. First, to find out what Vermont teens were thinking, doing, and saying, she and co-director Abby Paige contacted people who work with young people across the state: teachers and principals, artists and writers, counselors, social service workers and therapists. They enlisted these individuals to help run workshops with teens in thirty-three towns and cities. Fifty-three workshops took place over the course of eight months, running the gamut from poetry and creative writing sessions to theater improvisation to round table discussions. Twenty-nine of these were directed or co-directed by O'Brien. She and Paige also put together a statewide advisory board made up of teenagers and adults from around Vermont.

O'Brien's pursuit of the real voices of teens reached even further. With Paige, she constructed a website calling for submissions from youths around the state and got them, in the hundreds. In addition, Paige also facilitated teen-made videos and documentaries, some of which are included in the recently published book-CD-DVD compilation of submissions, Listen: Collected Works From the Files of the Voices Project. Then both women conducted individual interviews of thirty-nine teens from all backgrounds, and added these recorded sessions to their now towering pile of source material. “Every stage has been, frankly, overwhelming… but I kept saying, if I've gotten this far, I can do the next step,” O’Brien says.

The next step was writing the script. O’Brien and Paige sat down with their “mile-high” pile of material and began noting common concerns among the teens, differences between urban and rural teens’ lives, and the recurring theme of how resilient these teenagers are, whatever their problems. “I was amazed – they come from broken families or extremely poor backgrounds and you wonder, how do they get up in the morning?” O’Brien says. O’Brien and Paige then created the musical's twenty-one characters and drew up a script over three months and multiple rewrites in collaboration with five chosen teens as well as during rehearsals by the actors, who could rephrase their lines according to what they felt was authentic. “This is the twenty-first draft of the play,” O’Brien laughs.

O’Brien’s goal was not to write a play about “do this, don’t do that” but to create a group of strong characters who are dealing with issues and whose lives loosely intersect. “The one overall concept was finding your voice and being heard,” she explains. Above all, she wanted it to be real. Some of the themes that found their way into the script include pop culture and living in the electronic age; the isolation felt by teens living in rural areas with no transportation; the trend of “cutting” – kids slash and cut their own flesh – in order to release pain and feel more in control of their lives. According to O’Brien, “Cutting is a real epidemic and there's a lot of pressure to look like P. Diddy even though you live in Vermont; kids struggle with that,” she says.

Some themes are familiar, like striving to fit in and worrying about body image. But O’Brien sees a lot more pessimism among teens today than she ever experienced as one herself. “A lot of kids now think the world is completely coming apart. I never thought that; the Vietnam War was ending, and we just didn't have that sort of feeling,” she says, attributing much of the attitude shift to media influence. “Media is so much more pervasive than it ever was, and a lot of it can be completely overwhelming and confusing – that's what we're trying to convey with the projectors and screen set, a sense of media encroaching and dictating how kids should act and be,” she explains. “But Vermont is still a rural state and kids still have a sense of safety, despite all the media.”

O’Brien, mother of 12-year-old Jasper and step-mother of 21-year-old Sasha, clearly loves and respects her teen co-workers. “The kids are totally psyched. There was a fairly competitive auditioning process with call-backs, and they know they were chosen [from a pool of 100 teens],” she said. The lucky twenty-one come from all over the state and from all different backgrounds, just like the teens who submitted their work. "They're from trailer parks, Harvard-bound, and everything in between,” O’Brien said. “They wouldn't have met each other if it weren't for this project. Now they're totally bonding; it's a complete lovefest.”

In a separate room, the teen performers bring this up themselves, after finishing a spontaneous rendition of the opening song. “This is our family,” explains Mitchell-Love. “We're going to have family reunions.” Jonathan Reid of South Londonderry, who attends Burr and Burton Academy, adds, “We're so affectionate – but you have to have that sort of connection” during this sort of project.

The cast members are all involved in their high school theater, but O’Brien points out that most kids don't usually get to play people their own age. Mitchell-Love concurs, "All these other plays have these two-dimensional characters, like Okalahoma.” And, Meredith Noseworthy of Norwich, who will be a junior in the fall at Hanover High School, adds, “This is a lot more real than any other musical.”

The actors are fervent about their purpose. “You can entertain with a musical but you can also raise questions,” says Noseworthy. “The questions this musical asks never get answered. There is no ending to this play; you have to decide for yourself at the end.”

“There’s no preaching, no message,” Lapaglia adds. “Just: this is reality; look at it. The idea is to get people to talk about controversial things that are really happening. If someone says anything at the end – even if they say, ‘I hated that!’, then we win.”

The Voices Project will be performed twelve times in ten different locations around Vermont, beginning at the Barre Opera House on Saturday, September 10 and ending at the Flynn Theater in Burlington on Sunday, October 9, 2005. See www.bcbsvt.com/voices for the complete schedule.

Amy Lilly is a freelance writer in Burlington.

For more info visit: http://www.bcbsvt.com/pages/voices/

Tour Dates

Week #1. Saturday, September 10, 7 p.m. – Barre Opera House, Barre

Sunday, September 11, 3 p.m. – Barre Opera House, Barre

Week #2. Friday, September 16, 7 p.m. – Lyndon Institute, Lyndonville

Saturday, September 17, 7 p.m. – Lyndon Institute, Lyndonville

Sunday, September 18, 7 p.m. – North Country Union H.S., Newport

Week #3. Saturday, September 24, 3 p.m., 7 p.m. – Town Hall Theater/Pentangle Arts Council, Woodstock

Sunday, September 25, 7 p.m. – Bellows Falls Union H.S., Westminster

Week #4. Friday, September 30, 7PM – Latchis Theater, Brattleboro

Saturday, October 1, 4 p.m. – Mount Anthony Union H.S., Bennington

Sunday, October 2, 7 p.m. – Vergennes High School, Vergennes

Week #5. Saturday, October 8, 7 p.m.– Paramount Theater, Rutland

Sunday, October 9, 7 p.m. – Flynn Theater, Burlington

Buy tickets from the Flynn Theater Regional box office at 802-863-5966

or go online at www.flynntix.org.