By RICHIE DAVIS
Packed with handmade quilts, horse-drawn carriages, signs, photos and memorabilia from towns long gone, the Swift River Valley Historical Society’s museum in New Salem breathes out the lives of families forced from their homes to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir.
The entire museum — the 1818 Whitaker-Clary House, carriage shed and Prescott church building — becomes the theater for an immersive theater production of “The Water Project,” a play about dislocation, memory and sense of place from the perspective of those families.
Audiences for the Sept. 22-24 production by TheaterTruck Collaborative and the Swift River Valley Historical Society “roam through this dreamscape, a kaleidoscope of different opportunities to follow different different characters as they encounter difft situations,” says playwright and co-director Emma Ayers, who presented a more script-driven version of her play at this summer’s “Full Disclosure Festival” in Greenfield.
It’s an evocative adaptation of the play, which uses the museum as the setting for audience members, released in groups for venues they choose, to explore the anxieties, heartbreak, rumors, and decisions that family members faced in Dana, Prescott, Greenwich and Enfield.
From the perspective of one character, Edith, as a 14-year-old girl anticipating having to leave home with her family, and as a 90-year-old nursing-home resident, the play can be “a commentary on What is memory? Who is the keeper of memory? And who decides what is remembered?” says Ayres, who wrote the play when she was still a University of Massachusetts theater student. For that matter, “History has changed, memory has changed; What is history? What is memory, What is the past? All these things are roaming around.”
Yet one of the beauties of the play — and of stimulating, audience-propelled immersive theater — is that not everyone spends time with the same characters in the same way.
“Everybody has their own experience,” says the lifelong Amherst resident. “At the end of the evening, it might be like, ‘Did you see that?’ ‘No, I didn’t. But did you see this?’ That’s part of the dreamscape we’re creating.”
Ayres, who works for Enchanted Circle Theater and is part of TheaterTruck, at one point imagined staging the play in the reservoir’s watershed itself, with its abandoned cellarholes and stonewalls.
But the museum, with its artifacts, provides inspiration for the theaterpiece, which “is so much about home. We need to use theater as a vehicle to reconnect to these histories, to this place. It’s been amazing to explore this story on different stages (in workshops and at “Full Disclosure”), but actually rooting it where it belongs has been truly mindblowing.”
In fact, the museum provides a vital touchstone for many of the survivor families of the lost Swift River Valley towns, who visit exactly because it offers their only real way back to what was taken from their past, says historical society president Elizabeth Sharpe.
“This is their home, what’s left of it,” Sharpe said, adding that the society’s membership of about 500 is around the country “because of that sense of home” and reaching out with events like tours of former settlements in the protected watershed. “When we have buses that go back into Quabbin, those buses are filled with people who are going home.”
The performance will incorporate five musical acts to accompany’s journeys. It will also weave in stories of the Swift River Valley’s indigenous people, who were also displaced, as told by a storyteller character played by University of Massachusetts historian Alice Nash.
As the church’s bell rings out throughout the evening to help the logistical coordination of performances indoors and outdoors throughout the property by 25 or so cast members, the peals will also convey the mounting anxiety of a population that knew it was running out of time in the Swift River Valley, culminating in the final tolling for a critical meeting to solidify the state’s decision, and then the farewell balls, adapted by “The Water Project” into a square dance.
The hour-long show, with 6 and 8:30 p.m. performances nightly for a maximum audience of 40 in each performance, has received funding from the cultural councils in Orange, Amherst, Shutesbuty, Wendell, New Salem and Pelham — communities surrounding the Quabbin, to which many of the dislocated families relocated after their expulsion.
To her, Ayres says, it’s as though those communities are giving back to the spirit those Swift River Valley emigres brought to their towns.
“People have been rallying behind the production,” says Ayres, who hopes to expose people to the story of the lost Quabbin towns and to the museum.
“In the way this performance is being built, it’s totally inspired by the site itself, Ayres said. “That collaboration with the house, has been really exciting in shaping this piece.”
Because there are so many stories being told simultaneously in “The Water Project,” depending on which character an audience member choses to follow, she says she hopes people will return to see it more than once.
Because the project is about different interpretations of memory, Ayres said, “People can have an infinite number of different experiences,” as their own guides through a dreamworld in a place “that’s just exploding with objects from peoples lives.”
Tickets cost $20 in advance ($15 students/seniors ) or $25, cash only, at the door ($20 students/seniors). To reserve, visit www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2595428.
The Swift River Valley Historical Society is at 40 Elm St. in North New Salem.