Bringing Ernest Hemingway to Life
Helltown Players Trustee John Dennis Anderson will bring Ernest Hemingway to life during a Chautauqua performance on Tuesday, September 5 at 6:30pm at the Truro Public Library. Performance Details >>
William Faulkner famously wrote that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
One of the ways the past comes alive is through a scholarly performance tradition known as Chautauqua. This distinctive form traces its roots (and name) to the educational programs of the original Chautauqua Institute in New York.
An American Performance Tradition…
Chautauqua performances present historical figures dramatically, bringing the characters to life so they can interact with audiences today. Chautauqua scholar/performers research their subjects in depth and shape monologues that they perform in first person as if the historical figure has stepped into the present. After presenting monologues in costume, they then answer questions from the audience still in character and then, at the end, out of character as scholars.
It’s a kind of game with its own unique rules. The historical figures remain in their historical times and can only answer questions up to (but not including) their deaths. So it’s against the rules to ask William Faulkner what he thinks, say, about Toni Morrison also winning the Nobel Prize (which he had won for 1949). Faulkner died in 1962, and Morrison didn’t win the Nobel until 1993. But you could ask Faulkner about his contemporaries, such as Richard Wright,Zora Neale Hurston, and . . . Ernest Hemingway!
Performance on Sept. 5…
And the day after Labor Day, you’ll have a chance to ask Hemingway what he thought, say, of Faulkner winning the Nobel, when John Dennis Anderson presents his Chautauqua performance as Ernest Hemingway at the Truro Public Library.
Anderson developed the performance in 2018 for the Oklahoma Chautauqua. He has since performed it at the Ashland Chautauqua in Ohio, at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre for the Open University of Wellfleet, and at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum in Piggott, Arkansas. The Museum is the former home of Hemingway’s second wife Pauline’s family and where he wrote part of A Farewell to Arms.
Embodied Scholarship…
As Hemingway, Anderson discusses his wounding in World War I, his being in love with two women at the same time in Paris, his iceberg theory of omission in writing fiction, his fascination with bullfighting, and other topics. The performance includes passages from the novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, as well as addressing Hemingway’s obsession with death and writing “one true sentence.”
Anderson considers his Chautauqua performances “embodied scholarship” because they combine dramatic characterizations with painstaking research. His goal is to shape the monologues as much as possible from first-person primary sources (autobiographies, letters, interviews, etc.) into a compelling monologue and then to channel the figures almost like a spirit medium—without the trance—when answering questions.
Walking a tightrope without a net…
The question-and-answer component of a Chautauqua performance is what is most distinctive about the form—and the most challenging. Anderson compares it to walking a tightrope without the net. He also distinguishes a Chautauqua monologue from solo biographical plays like The Belle of Amherst, William Luce’s play about the poet Emily Dickinson so memorably performed by Julie Harris. A Chautauqua monologue sometimes only hints at implied topics as a way of inducing the audience to ask questions, whereas a solo play presents more complete dramatic episodes and uses more dramatic license to invent elements beyond the known historical record. Anderson has been exploring the differences as he revises his Chautauqua monologues into plays, such as Isherwood, the work-in-progress he read for the Truro Playwright Collective last April.
Anderson got his start doing Chautauqua performances in 1994 as Henry James and in 1995 as William Faulkner. He has since developed performances as Washington Irving, Robert Frost, Lynn Riggs, Henry Beston, Marshall McLuhan, and, most recently, Christopher Isherwood. In April, he will reprise his commissioned performance in Ashland, Ohio, as Ohio novelist (and one-time friend of Ernest Hemingway) Louis Bromfield. Come to the Truro Public Library on September 5 at 6:30, and you can ask Hemingway why he became disgusted with “Brommy”!
Anderson will repeat the Hemingway performance on Sept. 9 at the History Alive! Colorado West Chautauqua in Grand Junction. The event’s theme is “Power of the Pen,” and Hemingway will be joined by performances of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Rachel Carson.
Helltown Players Trustee John Dennis Anderson will bring Ernest Hemingway to life during a Chautauqua performance on Tuesday, September 5 at 6:30pm at the Truro Public Library. Performance Details >>