The cast of Northern Stage’s „The Vermont Farm Project“ during a dress rehearsal in White River Junction, Vt. (Kata Sasvari photograph) —
By ALEX HANSON
Valley News Staff Writer
Long a ripe subject for literature, farming is difficult to dramatize. How do you squeeze a farmer’s lifetime of daily toil into the length of a play or a feature film? The necessary decisions can’t help but leave an incomplete impression.
So it is with “The Vermont Farm Project,” a musical generated by Northern Stage and some of the young talent the White River Junction theater company has attracted. Directed by Sarah Elizabeth Wansley and with music by her husband, the actor, musician and composer Tommy Crawford, the budding project overpowers its lack of drama with extraordinary heart, brilliant music and acting, and smartly drawn characters.
The action of the play unfolds over the course of a single day on three Vermont farms. Playwright Jessica Kahkoska, who has collaborated with Wansley and Crawford before, has given voice to a set of eight characters at different stages in their farming careers. Glenn and Kim are established farmers, wondering how they’re going to preserve what they’ve built. Matt and Kenza are new farmers and new parents, trying to balance raising animals, crops for the farmers market and a young child. Gabriela is one of two women among 50 employees of a massive dairy farm; she yearns for her native Chiapas, Mexico, and the growing son she left behind there, but has become a capable farmer. And Glenn and Kim’s three young farmhands, Mo, Tara and Hunter, serve as both comic relief and, with varying levels of certainty, the future of farming.
To create the show, Wansley, Crawford and Kahkoska interviewed dozens of people on a wide range of farms, from small vegetable farms to giant dairy operations, starting in 2022. The concerns of their characters, which consist overwhelmingly of what the future holds for them and their crops and land as they work their way through a typical farm day, comes through loud and clear.
But what can’t come through in a theater is the life of a farm, its animals, in whatever state of health they might be, the smells, the constant sounds of chickens, cows, machinery and people working. Farming is a messy business and theater is a tidy one, and this mismatch makes it hard for the two to meet on common terms.
Farming also, more than most occupations, accrues meaning over time. So a 95-minute musical will struggle to tap into that meaning. As much as we hear from the farmers’ mouths, and see in their demeanors, the audience isn’t going to understand what it’s like for a farmer to lose a treasured ewe during lambing season and still get on with the necessity of feeding the rest of the flock and nursing the lambs. It’s heartbreaking, but there isn’t much time for sentimentality.
“The Vermont Farm Project,” though, wears its heart on its sleeve. Land and the things that grow from it are a source of longing and these characters long for their piece of it. Most of the characters’ concerns and fears are mitigated by the full and varied lives they’re leading.
The actors make of this what they can. David Lutkin plays Glenn, the project’s old salt, with an easy, laconic, charm, and Emily Mikesell plays Kim with some banked fire. Three younger actors each take on two roles. Raquel Chavez has the biggest stretch, playing Gabriela, who pines for home and family until an offer from her boss changes her calculations, and Mo, a kid taking a “figure it out summer” break from college. Angel Lin plays both the harried farmer Kenza and the earnest student Tara, who dreams of farming (“I think I like dirt,” she says) with winning enthusiasm. And Rob Morrison lends to both Matt, an eager but anxious farmer, and Hunter, a lost young man, a kind of abashed grace.
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While the acting is uniformly good, the music is what makes “The Vermont Farm Project” worth seeing. The songs express the play’s range of emotions and though the show is a work in progress the actors make them stick. (Wansley noted from the stage before Friday night’s final preview that they had changed the order of the songs from the previous night’s show.)
The actors are also their own band, which makes the show feel almost like a concert at times, though the songs are always in service to the characters. Two of the solo turns, Chavez singing “Dos Anos,” about her life far from home, and Morrison singing the comic “37 Ways to Cook Kohlrabi,” are among the standouts. The three farm helpers sing a hilarious screed about the death of family farms that gently parodies their post-adolescent self-seriousness (“Remember, you vote with your fork!” Tara says).
If there’s an overall fault in this production, it’s that it could come off as a bit precious. It’s subtitled “A Farm to Stage Musical,” and the overtone of farm-to-table dining is inescapable. In the middle of the play, Kim engages in a conversation with a patron at the farmer’s market and explains why the vegetables she’s selling cost so much more than what’s at the supermarket. I’m not sure what this play would mean to the person who makes a weekly shopping trip to Hannaford or Market Basket to stretch their food money.
This Ivy League view of farming helps explain why the dramatic stakes are so low. The most moving moments come from a poem, included in the play, by Paco Mendoza, a manager of Newmont Farm, a big dairy operation in Fairlee, and from Gabriela, who in a reprise of “Don Anos” sings “a place for us is all I need.”
The Upper Valley is fixated on land and who controls it, so it makes sense to acknowledge that a place here is hard to find. A farm is a rarefied form of housing; nice work if you can get it.
Northern Stage’s production of “The Vermont Farm Project” runs through May 25 in the Barrette Center in White River Junction. For tickets ($20-74) go to northernstage.org or call 802-296-7000.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
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