BRATTLEBORO-Vermont Suitcase Company (VSC) players know how to get folks laughing - belly laughs, slapstick laughs, laughs at poignant ironies, at itchy truths, at innocent manifestations of good-heartedness.
Following the success of 2023's popular VSC play about Wenceslas, the 10th-century Duke of Bohemia whose kind and generous spirit made him worthy of his own Christmas carol, the company presents The Continuing Adventures of King Wenceslas and His Page, Edith: A Winter Tale for Winter People, with performances throughout the region over the next couple of weeks.
A media release urges audiences seeking an upbeat holiday spirit to follow the two protagonists "across the deep and crisp and even snow of Medieval Europe in their comedic search for meaning and goodness."
"This play delves deep between the stanzas of everyone's favorite Christmas carol, delighting audiences with quick-paced physical comedy, stage magic, and puppets, all performed by four actors."
Written and directed by Rosa Palmeri, the short play features Cassidy Majer, Doran Hamm, Matt Tibbs, and Shannon Ward as actors, with costumes, puppets, set, and props by Sandy Klein.
The Commons spoke recently with three key creators of the touring show: Ward, Hamm, and Klein.
* * *
Annie Landenberger: So tell me about the continuing tale of Wenceslas.
Shannon Ward: We've been doing summer tours for six years now. And last year we did our first winter tour, our interpretation of the Good King Wenceslas carol that Rosa Palmeri wrote. [This year's continuation] is a very, very silly, clown-y version of the events. It's in the same world as last year's show; it's very physical, too.
Essentially, Wenceslas starts out in his castle with his family; he decides to go on an adventure to help a peasant, and on the way he meets others and shares adventures with them.
And it's those scenes in the middle, those adventures, the people that he meets along the way, that are different this year. So there are new people he's meeting - new characters.
A.L.: So smart: You've got a structure on which you can hang different episodes each year. It's picaresque, and Wenceslas is the picaro.
S.W.: Yeah, they're like little vignettes, but they all lead toward the end goal. It's essentially the story in the carol of how Wenceslas became a saint. We're taking the events from the [five-stanza] carol, which are kind of vague, and fleshing them out in our own interpretation, as if to say with each new vignette "and this is what really happened."
Dory Hamm: Yeah, we sell it as the 100% historically accurate Vermont Suitcase version of how King Wenceslas became a saint. So you can take all that absolutely with a grain of salt.
Sandy Klein: Although Rosa does dip into the history. A lot of stuff surfaces from the actual history.
D.H.: Like you meet his mother and brother, and in the real story of King Wenceslas, his brother beheads him.
A.L.: Bummer.
D.H.: Yeah, we don't do that in ours. This year, we play on the fact that King Wenceslas is a bit of a sheltered dope who has no connection to his people and is just sort of up in his castle, completely clueless as to what his people are doing, or what the commoner's life is like.
His page, Edith, is the hero that actually drags him out of his castle to go meet his people, to perform some miracles.
S.K.: Through the snowy white wastelands.
A.L.: I love it. So it's as if the Emperor [of The Emperor's New Clothes, a signature VSC piece] kind of went through a time warp and found himself in a different milieu.
S.W.: Yeah. You know, there are some tropes that Vermont Suitcase likes to play with, definitely. The sheltered king is one of them.
A.L.: About the script, it "delves between the stanzas": it's just so perfect, so telling.
S.W.: Rosa really ran with it. There's even something like, that [Wenceslas] "warmed the snow to warm the page's feet," and we have kind of a silly way that that comes about. It's all kind of by accident. And Rosa did a very, very clever interpretation of it.
S.K.: And another thing it affords is we get to cast our very large collection of puppets. Over the past six years, I've been making puppets for the different shows: we have many now, and they [repeatedly] get recast.
D.H.: And because this show is only four actors, we definitely lean extra heavily on our puppets in supporting roles.
S.W.: Matt Tibbs and Cassidy Majer are playing the king and the page, and Dory and I play every other character. There's a crowd scene in this show, so that's going to be me and Dory plus two puppets on each hand so that we can have a bunch of characters on stage at once.
A.L.: Are you still working in the commedia dell'arte vein?
S.W.: Yeah, the idea is to be able to pick it up and plop it wherever; it's in that spirit.
A.L.: In a nutshell, can you tell me the theme? The why?
D.H.: It is the Christmas Carol trope - that to connect with all humans is to kind of learn your own basic goodness. I think when Wenceslas begins to see that the peasants in his land are just real people living real human everyday lives, he begins to relate with them and to see his own humanity. That's the nut of the story.
A.L.: About goodness. Lovely.
D.H.: He learns about his servant, and he learns about himself; he's just been so pampered and sheltered his whole life, and he begins to see others [with kindness].
A.L.: So it's totally for all ages, right?
S.W.: It's extremely kid- and adult-friendly. People like their holiday traditions: They see A Christmas Carol every year, The Nutcracker every year.
D.H.: So this is our weird version of a Christmas-y tradition.
A.L.: I love it.
S.W.: Oh, and when we were talking about doing the show, we wanted it to be an inclusive holiday show and not just Christmas-based. So Dory came up with "a winter tale for winter people."
A.L.: It works. A little Shakespeare, a lot of Vermont.
* * *
The Continuing Adventures of King Wenceslas and His Page, Edith plays in Brattleboro at Midnight's in the Brooks House (Friday, Dec. 13, 9 p.m.) and the Hooker-Dunham Theater, 139 Main St. (Saturday, Dec. 14, 7 p.m.); at Wardsboro Curtain Call in the Wardsboro Town Hall (Thursday, Dec. 19, 7 p.m.); at Next Stage Arts in Putney (Friday, Dec. 20, 7 p.m.); at Main Street Arts in Saxtons River (Saturday, Dec. 21, 7 p.m.), and at New England Youth Theatre in Brattleboro (Sunday, Dec. 22, 2 p.m.). It runs under an hour. Most performances are admission by donation. For more information, visit vermontsuitcasecompany.com.
Annie Landenberger is an arts writer and columnist for The Commons. She also is one half of the musical duo Bard Owl, with partner T. Breeze Verdant.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.