Ahh, farm life. Picture it: goats munching away in lush meadows, chickens pecking at feed in the yard, wicker baskets filled with fresh eggs and beautiful vegetables growing in abundance.
It’s a nice, romantic fantasy. But in real life, that bucolic dream clashes with a reality that is much crueler and more mundane. Chickens are killed by foxes, freezes wipe out entire crops, dirt is everywhere and the manure that needs to be shoveled is never-ending.
But that intersection of dreams and reality is a place where another type of growing can happen – the growing of self, spirit and understanding.
That’s the idea at the heart of “Growing: Adventures in Food and Farming,” a one-woman play written by and starring Mancos farmer Sarah Syverson. The play, presented by Merely Players, opens today at the Durango Arts Center.
“Growing” is a funny and fast-paced production that tells one woman’s story of how she came to farming, and the deep and humbling lessons it taught her. Loosely following the arc of Syverson’s life, it starts with a young girl obsessed with “Little House on the Prairie,” and follows her as she loses her connections with the land and then returns to them, with hilarious results.
The play is populated by a range of characters – from an old goat woman to a canning cheerleader and a seasoned feed store clerk – all played nimbly by Syverson, who adroitly switches between voices, postures and tones to tell her compelling tale. And along with the humor in Syverson’s initial naïvety and the mistakes she makes, “Growing” holds lessons about finding the person you really want to be.
“The play is about growing food, but it’s also about growing ourselves through the dreams that we have,” Syverson said.
Syverson, an actor who wrote and starred in another one-woman play, “Secret Lives of the Divine,” five years ago, was inspired to write “Growing” by her experience of buying 3 acres in Mancos with her partner and turning it into the Little Bits Farm. Though she had harbored romantic notions of growing food as a child, the reality was a different story.
“The show I think was born out of that illusion of what a childhood dream is about, and then the reality of it, and when the illusion meets that reality, the growth that happens,” she said.
Once she started developing the script, Syverson approached Merely Players founder and director Mona Wood-Patterson, whom she had worked with on other projects, about collaborating.
Wood-Patterson said she saw in the bones of the script the promise of a compelling play. And in Syverson, an actor talented enough to pull off the daunting challenges of a one-woman show.
“I’m really sold on the metaphor of growing in life. I believe in the local food movement. And we wanted to support Sarah,” Wood-Patterson said. “So we decided to take it on.”
In what Wood-Patterson describes as a “symbiotic” relationship, the women went to work turning the work into a fully formed play. “Growing,” which kicks off Merely Players’ 2014 season, is the first original work Wood-Patterson has directed that she didn’t write herself.
Using a Hero’s Journey model and a playful set built by Merely Players’ Charles Ford, they came up with a story about pastoral childhood fantasies of one girl that are swept away in the consumer-obsessed decades of the 1980s and ’90s, only to be rediscovered through a meditative epiphany.
But once the protagonist takes the leap and buys a farm, she has some hard lessons to learn – the bone-weariness of farm work, the art of milking a “kicky” goat, the difference between straw and hay, the nuances of the seasons and the ruthlessness of nature.
Eventually, the fantasies drop away, replaced by the day-to-day tasks of weeding, mucking, feeding and harvesting, and what’s left is a deep connection with the seasons, an abundant mentality and the satisfaction that comes with creating and nurturing life.
“I hope that the audience is able to relate to the story as more than an adventure in food and farming,” Wood-Patterson said. “It’s actually a universal life process ... a classic journey as we go through and try to figure out, ‘what life is suited to me?’”
kklingsporn@durangoherald.com
If you go
Merely players will present “Growing,” a one-woman play by Sarah Syverson, at 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday and Sept. 5-6 at the Durango Arts Center, 802 East Second Ave. Tickets are $20 and are available at DAC, by calling 259-2606 or online at www.durangoarts.tix.com.
