“I have always been passionate about theater. When I was a little girl, I put on shows in the basement of our house. In 2016, I started my own theater company here called We the People Theatre. It was a very tumultuous time, so I wanted to produce 1776, which is a wonderful play about the founding of our country. I took it around to different groups in the Upper Valley, but none of them wanted to do the production, so I decided to do it myself. Happily, it was a big success. Thousands of people came. We delivered on our mission of doing theater that would help people connect and talk to each other.
That was the beginning. We started as a one-time production, but it was such a success that I felt a lot of energy from the actors and designers and from the community. They were asking, what are you going to do next? The next year, we did Working, which is a show that highlights regular working people. It’s a very real show that tells poignant stories. And then last March, we were about four days away from opening Man of La Mancha, a story about dreaming impossible dreams, when the pandemic hit. We had just gone through tech weekend. Sets were built. We were ready to go, and we had to shut down. That was very sad for all of us, but it was the right thing to do.
Especially after the year we have had, we now want to give everyone opportunities to express themselves and to be in community. So, we’re thinking about doing an inclusive theater project. An inclusive project welcomes people with and without disability, whatever their disability might be – whether it’s Down syndrome, autism, or cerebral palsy. We want to make it as inclusive as possible, both for the audience and actors. We believe that everyone has a place in the story.
One reason I connected with this idea is that last fall I had a health scare. I had a brain tumor. It was the first time I felt “less than”. I had surgery in the fall, so I’m doing fine now, but it gave me a lot of empathy for people who have things holding them back.
There are plenty of plays that are nothing but fun and frothy, and there is nothing wrong with that, but we really set out to find stories that will get people thinking and looking at the world in a new way. I hear from people all the time about how these productions moved them. So, I don’t always think it’s great career advice to do what you love, but it’s great advice to never stop doing what you love.” – Perry Allison, Thetford, VT
