As the high-80s heat bore down on them, two young men in sweatpants and tricorne hats were discussing their love lives, a potential prank and the coming revolution.
Elihu Ashley, a doctor’s apprentice, checked to make sure his father wasn’t eavesdropping as he talked with his friend David Dickinson about mounting political tensions in their hometown of Deerfield. It wasn’t long before Cynthia Williams — who was both Ashley’s paramour and the sister of his fiancée — joined them. The three spoke of tea, playing cards, a paternity suit and their families’ competing political allegiances, even as one of the men chided that it was unseemly “to speak of politics in front of a lady.”
They heard that a pole — one taller than Ashley’s own house — would soon be installed in their town to make a statement against unfair taxation. Ashley felt it was overkill. “Even for a people obsessed with symbolic revolution, it speaks as much to their manhood as it does to their politics that they feel the need for such a large pole,” he remarked. The pole would only worsen existing tensions, he thought — possibly to the point of creating bloodshed.
“I’m not a Tory. I simply believe in standing for the well-being of this town and against the things that would tear us apart,” he said. “We need to find a way for the town to see that they have gone too far — hold a mirror up to their foolish talk of rebellion before it is too late. Maybe cut them down to size.”
It was an afternoon in June, in reality, but in their world, it was July 29, 1774. The three friends — played by Yar Petrov, Mario Longo-Imbimbo and Lena Vani, respectively — were part of a new show about Historic Deerfield’s ties to the American Revolution.
The museum will host “A Stake in the Ground: 1774,” a show made of three 20-minute, site-specific plays produced by Boston-based theater company, Plays in Place. The show runs through Sunday, Aug. 16, with performances from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. on Sundays. At each performance, the audience will walk from one historic location to the next, with seating provided at each stop.
The “stake” in question is not only a physical stake — a Liberty Pole, which was a towering timber mast erected by the Sons of Liberty to represent their disdain for the British government — but also the stakes and complexities of potential revolution, freedom and war. As Ashley wrote in his diary in 1774: “All nature seems to be in confusion; every person in fear of what his neighbor will do to him. Such times were never seen in New England.”
“Each of these plays has a really beautiful glimpse into these characters as very nuanced people, people with dreams and a certain way of being as individuals,” said Brianna Sloane, the show’s director. “But we’re also looking at history and major historical events and and the fact that we’re on the cusp of the revolution, but nobody quite knows it yet.”
All of the plays take place on the same day. The aforementioned first play, written by Talya Kingston, is called “The Liberty Lark,” and takes place outside of Ashley’s home. Much of it is based on Ashley’s real-life diary.
“Some of the research in the playwriting turned up ideas that sort of challenge what we might think of as what New Englanders were like in 1774,” Sloane said. “I told these young actors that I think about [their characters] as the UMass bros of Deerfield in 1774. … They’re knuckle-bumping, in a way, and talking about girls and alcohol and this Liberty Pole coming to town and what they can do about it, sort of as a jest.”
The second play, “Jinny and Cato” by Valyn Lyric Turner, centers on a mother and son who were enslaved in the Ashley household. Jinny longs to return to Guinea, the homeland from which she was kidnapped. However, Cato, who grew up in the Ashley household, wants to be a good Englishman and misses his time in the military.
“It really feels like a first-generation [immigrant] story,” Sloane said.
Even though Cato spent his childhood with Elihu and Elihu’s brother Jonathan, he and the Ashley boys were “not ultimately like brothers,” Sloane noted. Jinny and Cato’s enslavers “would have seen them as members of the family, but, of course, that doesn’t extend to having any kind of actual equality or equity.”
The third play, “Sparks on Dry Tinder” by Patrick Gabridge, comes after the Liberty Pole has already been established. Cynthia Williams returns to speak with Mary Stebbins, who is attempting to calm her son, Joseph Stebbins Jr. — a hothead who runs the militia. This show takes place near a replica Liberty Pole that stands where the original one once stood in Deerfield centuries ago.
“We always think of the Revolution as happening in Lexington and Concord and the eastern part of the state, but, really, the tensions and the heat [were] really coming out of these small towns in the colony out west,” Kingston said.
The production team also felt that the historical ideological conflicts the show depicts had strong connections to modern-day American politics. “There was something about the heat around the courts and people usurping the court system and neighbors having different signs outside their houses to show their allegiances that felt both very much of the time and very contemporary to us now,” Kingston added.
Sloane and Kingston both used the phrase “unflattening history” to describe the work that Plays in Place does.
“I’m not usually a ‘woo-woo’ person, but there is a feeling [that] you’re conjuring ghosts,” Kingston said of the creative process. “When a car goes past or a person goes past in contemporary clothing, it doesn’t bother me, because you immediately get to see the present and past collide. … It’s like time travel.”
The cast of “A Stake in the Ground: 1774” features Yar Petrov, Mario Longo-Imbimbo, Lena Vani, Alika Hope, Marcus Neverson, Tracy Grammer and Noah D. Braunstein.
Tickets are $25 for adults, $20 for members and $15 for college students and youth 17 and under. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit historic-deerfield.org/events/a-stake-in-the-ground-1774. Performances will take place rain or shine, moving inside the Deerfield Community Center in the event of severe storms or extreme heat.
