Mohonk Mountain Stage Company presents John Mighton's HALF LIFE at Unison Arts
by M.R. Smith

To what extent are we only the sum product of our memories and experiences? If we lose memory, do we also lose identity? These questions are explored in an upcoming Mohonk Mountain Stage Company performance of John Mighton’s play Half Life, at Unison Arts in New Paltz.

Local theatre lovers are no doubt familiar with MMSC, which since its inception in 1994, has served the community under three formats: the Theatre for Young Audiences, the Reader’s Theatre Group, and MMSC Publications. Founder Robert Miller had originally made his career in Florida, where he was the artistic director of the prestigious Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota. The quality of life in the Florida theatre business was found wanting, so when wife and collaborator Christine Crawfis was offered a job in New York with the American Crafts Council, they packed up their belongings (and teenagers) and made the move to the Hudson Valley in 1991. Miller started the Theatre for Young Audiences, a participatory format for kids—grades pre–K through three—which become modestly successful, touring nationally and appearing at the Kennedy Center in New York City before winding down in 1998.

Oddly enough, what started out as a side project, however, became the main thrust of the company. The Readers Theatre Group started as a venue for people whose love for the written and spoken word needed an outlet, and found a local and loyal audience.

“We’re a very text–based company,” said Crawfis. “That’s where our focus is, on the written word. When you present in reader’s theatre format, which we think is largely misunderstood most of the time, it allows a wide range of material to be dealt with, including short stories and poetry—a whole world of things. We try to select text that lends itself to the format, and is even enhanced by it.”

According to Crawfis, venues weren’t a problem due to the portability. “We just need a music stand, a couple of stools, and an audience with an imagination.” Unison Arts has been in the picture since the beginning (where, in their first season they allowed MMSC to use rehearsal facilities for TYA in exchange for a performance) but other venues have stepped up as well, including Center for Performing Arts in Rhinebeck, and more recently, St. Andrews Episcopalian Church in New Paltz.

The company members also help out by bringing ideas and new projects to the table. A recent favorite was “A Celebration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” which featured company member Don Wildy reading all 154 sonnets, requiring 5 performances. Sonnet lovers read along with their own versions, resulting in a feast of poetic furor. Last spring had an unexpected hit with an evening of Dadaist poetry, and just this last month locals were treated to a reading of the immensely popular Tuesdays with Morrie, adapted by MMSC playwriting favorite, Jeffrey Hatcher. Most recently, MMSC has found success with their publishing arm, holding a poetry contest every other year, and publishing the winners in a collection entitled Vanguard Voices of the Hudson Valley. A new line of children’s audio books that can be customized for the specific child are available, as is an exciting collaboration with Olivebridge–based Actors and Writers, who for the last ten years, have been doing an annual festival of short plays written and performed by members. MMSC will be offering a “best of” selection, and seem to be a natural fit with A&W.

Although there is ample writing talent in the area, Crawfis was interested in finding a well–written piece by a Canadian writer, mostly because Canadian playwrights are “something we don’t usually get to hear about.” After some online investigation, she came across Half Life by Canadian playwright, educator, and mathematician John Mighton, winner of the Canada Council for the Arts Governor General’s Literary Award. Something of a renaissance man, Mighton got his degree in philosophy, is now an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, founder of the math tutoring program JUMP, and a multiple award–winner for playwriting, with Half Life being remounted at CanStage after enjoying a successful run at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 2005.

Half Life, directed by Crawfis, and performed by company members Paul Coleman, Elizabeth Barrows, Bill Connors, Ruth Berg, Douglas Woolley, Barbara McMahon Scanlon, and Rosemarie Navarra, takes place at a home for the elderly, where its two main characters find themselves re–imagining a forgotten love affair that might or might have not been, an idea based on real experience for the author.

“My mother was in a home for five years,” said Mighton, “and there was a couple who fell in love and decided to get married. They were both in wheelchairs, and had difficulty communicating. You could see the progression of their marriage; all of it happening in an accelerated form. So the idea partly came from that.”

The structure of Half Life is a series of dreamlike vignettes: scenes fade into blackness, or are abruptly interrupted. When asked how he developed this form for the play, Mighton pleads serendipity. “I didn’t know what to do with all this material until I just remembered randomly one day that people tend to forget stories at parties. As soon as I wrote the monologue that opens the play I realized I had a form for the rest of the piece. I could just let the stories tell themselves and then fall away whenever they needed to.”

“The whole play is about entropy and our fight against loss of memory, loss of order, I think one of the things that prevent us from diving into life is quite often our memories… it takes a lot of mental discipline to control our memories. We all have very deep memories of things that have shaped us that are almost impossible to let go of, and that will stop us from taking risks, changing careers, or even reinventing ourselves. We’ll think, ‘I don’t have that ability, no I wasn’t born with that gift,’ so we don’t do certain things.”

Without the visual distractions of staging and lighting, Mighton’s text will get full attention from the MMSC cast and attentive audience. Still, when asked about the relevance of this theatrical format, Crawfis asserts, “It’s a basic human need, storytelling. It isn’t going to go away. There’s a special nature to a room full of people, sitting in the same place, sharing the same energy, all focused on a single idea. That isn’t going to be replaced by YouTube.”

Or maybe it’s two ideas we’re reaching for together. As Mighton says, “I’m interested in that duality, how the mind can feel this sense of wonder and euphoria about the world, and also recognize that we don’t know anything. That’s in everything I write. There’s a line in the play where one of the characters says, ‘Maybe we weren’t meant to suffer or be happy, but to do both at the same time,” and I think that kind of bitter–sweetness, the suffering where you’re also happy is the same in terms of the imagination. We were meant, I think, to be in a state of wonder…”

“Wonder, and a state of abject humility at the same time.”
John Mighton’s Half Life will be performed March 14, 15, 21, and 22 at the Unison Arts Center on Mountain Rest Rd., just west of New Paltz. Contact MMSC at www.mmstageco.com or 845.255.3102. Unison Arts can be contacted at www.unisonarts.org or 845.255.1559. Quotes from John Mighton courtesy of Christine Crawfis.