A tell-tale art An idea for how theater could help put our local stories back in circulation BY MEGAN GRUMBLING

The currency of the local story, in American culture, has largely gone the way of the Gold Standard. Sure, we’re flush with the stories of Shakespeare and Wes Anderson, but when was the last time you sat and listened to an old-timer from your own town tell of what went on in your neighborhood 60 years ago, or where you could hear the best local bands during WWII, or what drunken debauchery in the Old Port used to be like?

Our older friends and family have a lot of precious stuff in them, and it’s not just the tales themselves, but also all of the old accents, cadences, and slangy goodness. These close-to-home stories, and the ways in which they’re told, are so valuable and so fleeting — and so well suited to dramatization — that I think more of them should have a more public place in our culture. My proposition for 2005 is that we institute a project and a yearly festival that would raise the tales of our own local characters up to the stage.

Let’s call it the Tell-Tale Project. Its mission would be to bring actors and oral historians together with some of our elders, who might be suggested as good subjects by community members or historical societies. Each actor, with the help of an oral historian, would listen to their character’s stories, document and transcribe them, pare them down to scripts of appropriate length and, finally, perform them for the community. In addition to the public dissemination, each partnership would result in an interview transcript and a stage-ready script for the archives, so that 30 or 50 years down the road a young actor could pull a file and recite the very words of a Mainer who could no longer tell the tale herself.

The Tell-Tale Project would need a core of a few experienced thespians and oral historians to provide guidance on documentary technique and to coordinate selections and direction of the performances themselves. It should also eventually have a home, with room enough for a few tools — computer, transcribing machine, recording devices — and for housing archives. Mainly, though, the Tell-Tale Project calls for investments of time and receptivity. It asks for people to get together and listen to each other, for community members to think about who their elders are, and for actors and interviewers to be willing to meet and talk with strangers.

Outreach projects would be natural fits for the Tell-Tale Project. Many schools already incorporate oral history into their social studies and Maine history units, and, with workshop help from the Tell-Tale actors and documentarians, could easily extend to performance. The scope of the project could easily be quite formidable, as colorful as Maine’s multi-cultural community is rapidly becoming. Imagine if, for one weekend a year, every eighth-grader in the state performed a story learned from one community elder? That would put a heck of a lot of Maine culture out into the public sphere.

We might look, as a model, to the community members of little Auglaize County, Ohio. These determined folks founded an oral history theater organization called " The Wallpaper Project, " which, since its inception in 1997, has collected interviews with local people and dramatized them in a yearly oral history play. In 2003, it decided to go statewide for Ohio’s 200th birthday, and toured the state with the production From Here: A Century of Voices from Ohio, which was based on interviews with over 800 everyday Ohioans. They received some funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, but when bigger grants fell through, the project had to rely on the goodwill of volunteers and of state historical, arts, and humanities societies.

Maine is lucky enough to boast a plethora of existing people and organizations that would be natural allies for the Tell-Tale Project, places like the Maine Historical Society, the Maine Folklife Center in Orono, and the University of Maine system’s Maine Studies Program. The Gorham campus of USM hosts the Center for the Study of Lives, which since 1988 has served the community with its efforts to elicit, preserve, and disseminate generations’ worth of Mainers’ stories. At the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, the documentarians-in-training could be a tremendous resource for both technical support and multi-disciplinary supplements to the performances, and experienced ethno-thespian Tim Collins created his Power Play (returning for another run in January) by interviewing Portland residents about their socio-political anxieties. As for funding, the Maine Humanities Council gives out grants for a multitude of culturally vital projects every year, and consistently earmarks money for all manner of public oral history works.

The Tell-Tale Project would result in more than just a weekend of performances. It would orchestrate an event that builds upon itself from one year to the next, would build an ever-growing repository of tales, and would help us return to an older idea of the role of stories. Although they’d be archived, some yarns would also, ideally, remain part of actors’ repertoires — so that the 30-year-old actor who dramatizes the tall tale of an 80-year-old lobsterman could conceivably still tell the same story when he’s 80, and then pass it on to another young thespian. The point is not just to hear the stories told, and not just to value them, but also to keep them in circulation. These are the riches that will only appreciate.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com