Look closely at any historical moment of great turmoil and change, and you’ll find daily life continues. Personal grief, unrelated to whatever national tragedies are unfolding, continues to take its toll. Friends argue in living rooms over the best way forward. And people often look for either distraction or consolation through live performance.
The Company Theatre is currently staging new play “The Summer Land,” set in 1848 when such entertainment came from the peculiar Fox Sisters, who helped spark the Spiritualist movement by performing séances with the dead.
Written by New York native and SUNY Geneseo alumni Kate Royal, the play is unabashedly centered on Rochester, and particularly its history with the women’s suffrage movement. Besides being set in the city, the show features historical Rochester abolitionists, from the highly celebrated Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass, to the more obscure, radical Quakers Amy and Isaac Post.
The Company Theatre’s home in the Temple Building Theater, a refurbished church, is the perfect venue for a play fascinated by the afterlife. The grand set design by Brodie McPherson (who also designed the atmospheric, shadowy lighting) consists of oversized, translucent curtains covering wooden panels, decorated with floating chairs and an upside down broomstick. A piano, on which a hymn or two gets played, and an Ouija board share the stage. Many of the scenes take place in living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms — spaces of the characters’ day-to-day personal lives, though shaped by larger political and spiritual questions.
Royal’s ambitious and well-researched script, brought to life by a talented ensemble of 14 actors playing 20 roles, explores both political tension among activists and the rise of the Fox Sisters. The linchpin is Amy Post, played by the commanding and sympathetic Erin Kate Howard, a Quaker swept up in debates about the best way to achieve social progress and equality. Her friends include Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Sammi Cohen), who prioritized white women getting the right to vote, and Frederick Douglass (Onosejere Perfect Ugbenin), who prioritized incrementalism starting with ending slavery. Though young, Ugbenin captures the charismatic gravitas of the iconic orator. Cynthia Brito delivers a compelling performance as his wife Anna Murray Douglass, voicing a Black woman’s urgent perspective in a play otherwise dominated by white women.
Amy Post and her husband Isaac (Christopher Conway) are grieving the loss of their child, and latch on to the Fox sister mediums to connect with her again. The Fox sisters are morose, solemn and pale, appropriate for the end of spooky season. Leah Fox (Kit Prelewitz) is the oldest and the strictest, as she leads Maggie (Jess Ruby) and Kate (Liz Preston) in their public performances. Both Ruby and Preston showcase grotesque physicality and eerie vocalizing as they do the “pendulum displays,” flopping over like marionette dolls and becoming channels for the deceased. When they face accusations of fraud, Amy Post stands by them, risking her own reputation.
Additional storylines round out the evening: tension between the sisters; a romance between Maggie and scientist Elisha Kent Kane (Philip Detrick); and dreams where Benjamin Franklin (Liam Enright) convinces Kate to become an abolitionist. Everything is loosely tied together with the idea of the 'Summerland,' a utopic afterlife where there is no slavery and no death.
Carl Del Buono’s quirky direction style is at times at odds with Royal’s earnestly historical script. Why is there a shirtless man in the first scene? What’s with the sudden Stevie Nicks strings arrangement underscoring halfway through act one? At its best, though, the production captures the thrill of the Fox sisters’ live performances and the ominous hope of connecting with the dead.
Theater artists often ask “why here, why now?” when choosing what to produce. “The Summer Land” is an inspired answer. Though imperfect — at just under three hours, the show is longer than it needs to be — the play is deeply invested in the time and place where it’s being produced. For audiences looking to contemplate the aftermath of a contentious election, this play offers solace through its characters, who are also navigating activism and grief in Rochester. To echo Mark Twain, as quoted in the playwright’s note, “History doesn’t repeat — but it often rhymes.”