Saturday, April 12, 2014

Review “Orphan Train”



The News Tribune, April 11, 2014

Hailey Jeffers and Jason Haws in Orphan Train. Photo by David Nowitz and Jill Carter.
The Orphan Train comes rolling into the Washington Center for the Performing Arts with stories of heartbreak and joy in the form of a play by Aurand Harris presented by Olympia Family Theater and ably directed by Kathy Dorgan.

Between 1853 and 1929 approximately 250,000 orphaned children from the streets of New York City were loaded onto box cars and shipped to towns out west to be adopted by pioneers. Some found good homes and some were placed with families that just wanted free labor. Many siblings were separated never to find each other again. Their deeply affecting stories range from overwhelming joy to heartbreak, and everything in between. Harris’s play tells ten of these stories in vignettes with a combination of narration and performance by a cast of two dozen actors ranging in age from 7 to 65, many of whom have extensive stage experience and a few of whom have no acting experience but act like seasoned pros.

Mary (Emma Haws, a veteran at age 11) is adopted by the mean spirited Mrs. Herndon (Jennie Jenks) who arbitrarily changes her name to Rebecca and forces her to sleep overnight in a damp root cellar with rodents. It is a heartbreaking story acted with great passion by both Haws and Jenks, which ends with a joyful note as Mary is taken away from Mrs. Hendon and placed with a more caring family.

Maria (Maggie Neatherlin) cares for her infant sister from whom she had promised her dying mother they would never be separated, but she is unable to keep her promise when a mother (Edsonya Charles) who has lost a baby adopts the little sister but will not take her teenage sibling. Maria has to make the decision to let her baby sister go for her own good.

Frank (played with sassy bravado by Annabelle Sampson, a third grader at Hansen Elementary now in her fifth play with OFT) is the toughest kid on the train. He’s adopted by a couple who needs a tough boy to work on their hardscrabble farm. The only trouble is, Frank is really a girl pretending to be a boy to survive on the streets, and she is just as sweet as her male persona is tough. What happens when her adoptive parents find out is very touching, and Sampson’s ability to convincingly become such different characters is laudable.

Lucky (Nick Hayes) is another tough, streetwise kid, a knife-wielding pickpocket whose own instinct toward self-preservation turns out to be his worst failing. Nick has performed in “Oklahoma!” at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre and is known locally for his performance as Tiny Tim at Capital Playhouse. His sister Kate, also a young veteran from the Capital Playhouse stage, plays Pegeen, a kind Irish lass. Actually the whole Hayes family including parents Jill and Ned Hayes are actors in this production.

These stories and others touch the audience’s hearts. The stories are all true, and they present a dramatic picture of a little-known part of American history. As presented they are realistic and never maudlin. All are played out in front of a backdrop consisting of two screens with outstanding line drawings, one of rolling hill and a train track with a small town in the distance and the other of a train station. Onto these screens are projected both still and moving vintage images with portraits of the actors in period costumes cleverly superimposed on these scenes.
The splendid scenes and projections are the work of Jill Carter. Costumes by Mishka Navarre contribute to the authenticity of the stories.

Among the more outstanding actors in this show are Jason Haws in a number of roles, including a drunk, a priest and a cowboy; and Keith Eisner as a farmer and an unnamed old man. Running a mere 65 minutes with a 15-minute intermission, “Orphan Train” is an excellent show. I would recommend that teachers encourage their students to see it. It would be great if they could bring entire classes and build class projects on a study of the true history of the trains.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 7 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, 1 p.m., through April 20, extra Saturday shows at 4:30 and 6:30 p.m. April 19
WHERE: Olympia Family Theater at the Washington Center Stage II, 512 Washington St. SE, Olympia,  
TICKETS: $10-$16, www.olytix.org
INFORMATION: 360.753.8585

1 comment:

  1. So glad to see your interest in the orphan train movement. I'm the author of MAIL-ORDER KID, a biography of an orphan train rider. I think that Kline's novel, ORPHAN TRAIN, which I reviewed, has set off the recent growth of interest in this important historical movement.

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