By Alec Clayton
Heartsparkle Players has been offering up Playback Theater for Olympia area audiences for more than 30 years. Playback, a unique form of improvisational theater, is fun, engaging, and can often be therapeutic. The basic idea is this: Someone from the audience tells the actors a story and the actors play the story back for the audience.
Heartsparkle Players performs once a month at Traditions Fair Trade Café, Fifth Avenue and Water Street in downtown Olympia, and they also do workshops and performances for schools, youth groups and social organizations such as Stonewall Youth, Community Youth Services and GRUB and others.
Founder Debe Edden says the group got started about 31 years ago. “We formed to use theater as a tool for social change. We wanted to prevent child sexual abuse. So we created short scripted pieces for school-age children to help educate them about what now is called personal safety — sexual abuse prevention. We performed in schools, at daycare centers, for community organizations throughout the state focusing mostly on Southwest Washington. We conducted thousands of performances for over 25 years. We also had a parent education component to our program.”
Edden says she first learned about Playback Theater from Leticia Nieto, a teacher at The Evergreen State College at the time who now teaches at St. Martin’s University. Edden also graduated from the Centre for Playback Theatre in New Paltz, New York.
There are seven actors in the company, two of whom, Edden and Elizabeth Lord, serve as “conductors,” and one of whom, Bob McKenzieSullivan, plays accompanying music for their performances. Their shows always begin with a warm-up — for both audience and actors — consisting of short pieces they call “moments” and “tableaux.” The conductor will ask for a volunteer in the audience and solicit a moment, some little thing that has happened in their life. The conductor will then set the scene for the actors who will act out the moment to accompanying music. For the tableaux the conductor will say one line and the actors will move into a “picture” of the moment and freeze. Then the conductor will say another line and the actors will move into the next picture. The movement is always done to music. It is the conductor’s job to create a supportive environment and treat the stories with respect, because sometimes people tell very personal stories.
After the warm-up period they go into acting out longer stories. A typical performance runs about an hour and a half.
All of the actors come to Heartsparkle from acting and performing backgrounds, and most of them have been with the group for many years.
Ethan Rogol is a Spanish teacher who teaches adults in private classes for his own company, Lengua Rica. He says he admired Heartsparkle for many years and joined because he thought doing playback could fit in, in a fun and creative way, with the way he teaches.
Jo Ann Young was with the group in the 1990s but dropped out and rejoined about two years ago. She has been a classroom teacher and has led workshops for Seattle Pacific University and the University of Idaho extension program. “I like to try new things and push myself,” she says. She says honoring people’s stories is a big part of what they do.
Lord is a professional storyteller and has acted with many traditional theater companies. She manages The Midnight Sun performance space and is the founder of Lord Franzannian’s Royal Olympian Spectacular Vaudeville Show.
Sullivan has taught music and drama at Rochester High School for more than 27 years and has acted on stage for more than 20 years.
Lydia Geth Leimbach came to the group in about 1996 because she says she wanted to do theater that could have something to do with social change.
Aeryk Bjork started with the group in ’95 or ’96 when they were doing scripted sex abuse prevention plays in schools. “This group has given me an opportunity to experience theater in many different ways,” he says.
Since the stories are true and personal, they can be heart wrenching. Lord recalls one they did a number of years ago at TESC for the campus support group The Rape Response Coalition. “During the performance a woman stepped forward and told her story of survival — and I had been selected to portray her in the playback of it. She described the rape event, and her feelings surrounding it. This was a very moving and emotional performance for me. Afterwards, I was exhausted, physically and emotionally. I felt honored that she trusted our group and our art form to safely hold her story, and I hope it was a cathartic experience for her.”
Leimbach says, “One of the gifts of being a playback performer is that I get to listen and honor stories from people whose lives are very different from mine. While our experiences may differ, our emotional responses are universal. I get to be humbled by peoples’ courage, sadness, and the wide palette of emotions that come with being human and living on this planet.”
Leimbach recalls one story during a performance for the Department of Corrections from a man who began his story by saying that he started life in a garbage can. His drug-addicted mother abandoned him in a garbage can. “Fortunately he was found, adopted, but went through some very tumultuous teenage years. He overcame his anger and bitterness and now had a good life. It was such an inspirational story of courage and triumph, and deeply humbling! When I think I have it bad, I can remember that story.”
And then there was the story about being in the south in the ’60s in a Laundromat and seeing a whites only sign and thinking it meant for clothing.
Edden elaborates on the story of the man who was abandoned in a garbage can. “As he told his life story – which is unusual in a performance – people do not tell their whole life story – once again I realized that this man had been on an epic journey in his 30-plus years. He had been in foster care all of his childhood. He moved from home to home and then as a teen he began to get in trouble. He spoke about not caring about himself — feeling like garbage. The entire time I felt the enormity and significance of his story, his journey, his telling. I was humbled. There was a pivotal moment in his life when he knew that if he did not make a change he would die. He did change and there he was sitting with his fellow corrections workers with the goal in mind to go to school and get a law degree so that he could help others.”
Edden says, “As a conductor I have sat next to many ‘everyday’ people telling me their stories. I am honored to do this. This man reminded me that none of us are ‘everyday’ and that we are all on an epic journey.”
