A Walk In the Woods

A couple of months ago I had a really bad day. A “quarantine has gotten the best of me” day. An “I’ve got to get out of the house or I’m going to scream” day. An “I have to do something to remind me of my life before COVID-19” day. So I got in my car and started driving.

After about 45 minutes, I ended up in Spring Green, at American Players Theatre. It is a place I have traveled to faithfully at least once a year, since my first visit in 1986.

In fact, I usually visit APT many times over the course of a summer, along with roughly a thousand other audience members per show. But that day it was a ghost town — like a city that was suddenly abandoned. A bit dazed, I spent three hours there, communing with the deserted grounds. The picnic tables were all still stacked up, stored for the off-season. There were no cans of bug spray set out for guests. Pine cones and branches dotted the well traveled trail up the hill, as if the path was being slowly reclaimed by nature. The experience was stark and sad, but comforting too, like the woods was patiently waiting for our return.

Over the course of the afternoon, I walked around, sat on the stage, and eventually took a seat at the back of the house. Because there was no audience but the wildlife, I even pulled one of my favorite Shakespeare monologues up on my phone and proclaimed it to the rows and rows of empty seats.

Walking up the empty aisles, my mind cleared a bit. I watched and waited, fascinated by the flights of the birds making entrances and exits in the space, listening to the wind in the trees, watching mini rainstorms come and go. And inevitably, I heard ghosts of performances past, remembering all the hot July nights, the cold September afternoons, the rainy August evenings, the bats, and the magical moments I had experienced when the sun set just enough for the stage lights to come on and the stars to come out.

I drove home with a steadier pulse and a calmer breath, as if just touching a talisman of summer was enough to sustain me for another week or two.

It was shortly after this solitary pilgramage that APT announced a similar experience open to the public — If These Trees Could Talk — which offered general audience members the chance to wander along one of three paths on the grounds, during daylight or evening hours. Accompanying the socially distanced “amble,” patrons were given headsets with a collage of poetry and prose read by members of APT’s Core Company of performers. Some were snippets of Shakespeare. Some were famous poems. Others were original works inspired by the woods.

The recording moved quickly from narrator to narrator and didn’t try to tell a unified story. It was a soundscape that complemented the surroundings. Some voices touched me, some harmonized with the rustle of wind through the trees. Some pieces made me look again at a terrain I thought I knew well.

I was both moved and reassured by the note from Artistic Director Brenda DeVita that came with the program, explaining that there was, “no right way to experience this walk. The only thing you need to do is be here now.”

So, after following the path and listening to the first half of the audio program, I turned off my headset and took a seat in the theater, just to experience being in the space once again. I watched other audience members explore the stage, speak speeches trippingly from the tongue, and pick out an aisle seat for the length of their own personal show. Then back down the path to our cars, cold hands warming on the steering wheel as we drove back to our quarantine lives.

On behalf of all the pilgrims who came back to the hill for some peace, thank you to DeVita and all the APT staff and volunteers who made this event possible. Thank you for allowing us to “take a breath, look out at the trees, and press play.”

We’ll see you next year.