Local resident Louise Smith, left, and New York residents Lizzie Olesker, center, and Peggy Pettitt will present “The Language of Dolls” — a play they wrote collaboratively and which centers questions of racial and cultural identity — at the Foundry Theater this weekend. The artists are pictured holding handmade dolls they created for the show. (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
‘The Language of Dolls’ to be staged at Foundry Theater
- Published: October 18, 2024
photo by lauren “chuck” shows
Local resident Louise Smith, left, and New York residents Lizzie Olesker, center, and Peggy Pettitt will present “The Language of Dolls” — a play they wrote collaboratively and which centers questions of racial and cultural identity — at the Foundry Theater this weekend. The artists are pictured holding handmade dolls they created for the show.
Conversations around ways of being and identity — particularly when they have to do with race, ethnicity and culture — can be difficult when those involved are bringing years of differing experiences and perspectives to the table.
But if there’s trust, duly shared in equal measure, those conversations can do powerful work.
That’s the working thesis that propels “The Language of Dolls,” a play written collaboratively by longtime friends, theater professionals and Antioch alumnae Lizzie Olesker, Peggy Pettitt and Louise Smith.
“The Language of Dolls,” produced by local theater company Mad River Theater Works, will be performed on the Antioch College Foundry Theater’s experimental stage Friday–Sunday, Oct. 18–20.
Pettitt, Olesker and Smith were Antioch College students in the 1970s, and have since built decades-long careers as playwrights and actors. They told the News this week that, after leaving college and breaking into their respective careers, they followed one another’s work closely and sometimes collaborated over the years.
A sampling of the three artists’ work together: Pettitt and Olesker performed together in a production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle” in the early 1980s; Smith and Pettitt co-created the play “Palaver,” which centers a friendship during the South African apartheid regime, in 1989; Olesker directed Smith’s 1990 play “White/Man/Fever” and her 2019 one-woman show “Dorothy Lane.”
“Because of our work in theater, we’ve been drawn to each other,” Pettitt said.
“I was always blown away by both these women as actors,” Olesker added.
The three women sat around a table below the stage where they would rehearse “The Language of Dolls” following their interview with the News; a sense of their years-long collective relationship hung in their glances, gestures and words.
“It’s a mutual admiration society, basically,” Smith said, to laughter from her friends and co-creators.
That mutual admiration, and the professional and personal bonds from which it sprung, is the bedrock upon which their new play rests, they said.
“The Language of Dolls” has, in one way or another, been in development for several years, beginning as a series of Zoom conversations between the three artists during COVID. Olesker, Pettitt and Smith talked about what they were reading, their differing backgrounds and questions they each had around their own experiences and the experiences of the other two.
They recorded those conversations, and from those recordings, they developed a text that served as a springboard for what would eventually become the play.
“One of the hard things we were talking about was race and racism — feelings and attitudes that are there and spoken or not spoken,” Olesker said.
“You think you’re all on the same page, and then find out that’s actually not true,” Smith added. “So we were left with these questions about what is the remedy, how do we address it, and what is the pain that still exists?”
The questions at the heart of their conversations, and eventually “The Language of Dolls,” are not simple ones, the artists said — Pettitt is Black and Olesker and Smith are white, and they said their disparate perspectives mean they often addressed the questions in different ways. But the trust the three have developed with one another over the decades made the process of delving deep into those questions safe and productive for them.
“We realize that sometimes on difficult issues, people can’t stay at the table because of lack of trust,” Pettitt said. “Meeting certain subject matter head-on and staying at the table like family gives you an elasticity for conversation — that interplay, that relationship, allows us to have a certain kind of conversation.”
She added that, though the conversations that move the play along are composed of difficult subject matter, there is room for a sense of humor, too.
“We’ve had fun — it’s pain and it’s joy,” she said. “Sometimes it gets confrontational, and sometimes it gets extremely open and light.”
Olesker, Pettitt and Smith developed a large part of “The Language of Dolls” during a month-long residency they undertook together last year at the Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks, where Pettitt raised the possibility of turning their recorded conversations into a work for the stage.
“It was really great to work that way — to actually take the conversation and make a dialogue out of it,” Olesker said. “But we also each wrote pieces that we contributed to the whole, and collaboratively sat down and changed things and wrote things together.”
The first audience members for an abbreviated version of “The Language of Dolls” were the other artists who partook in the residency. In its way, the product of their residency mirrors the residency itself: The three worked together in a cabin studio in the woods to create the first version of the play, and the play itself features three women having conversations over an evening, into the night and into the following morning as they stay together in a cabin in the woods.
The characters they play, too, are mirrors of their individual selves, they said — formed from their own experiences and thoughts, but, as Smith said, just pushed “a little further.” The closeness and distance necessary to play versions of themselves was instructive on both creative and personal levels for the artists.
“In some ways, I’m playing a past self, in how I understood, say, race,” she said. “My character is well-intentioned, but takes foot and puts it in mouth — does and says all the wrong things. There was a time in my life when I was more like the character I am in the play than maybe I am now — she’s not that far away from me.”
“It’s a character, but it’s not a character — it’s not me, but it is me,” Olesker added. “The tension between those two things I find really interesting about the piece.”
As the play’s title acknowledges, dolls are an important central theme to the conversations and questions that run through its narrative — particularly as they relate to how people see themselves reflected in the imagery that dolls, and other kinds of items that depict human forms, represent.
“Dolls have had an influence on the images and depictions of Black people throughout American history — you can find that kind of memorabilia anywhere,” Pettitt said. “It says so much when you see a Black salt shaker with protruding lips and enormous eyes, and people actually have that at their table — there’s a message there.”
She added: “We’re constantly being told about our place, who we are as women — it becomes very important to try to search for, ‘Why do I exist? Who am I?’”
A number of dolls make appearances throughout the play; some of the dolls were found and bought by the cast at antique stores. One doll — a “topsy-turvy” type that features two heads and torsos, one Black and one white, with a skirt that can be flipped down to hide one or the other — has belonged to Pettitt since her childhood. Three of the dolls were created by the cast themselves, to represent aspects of their characters.
The play’s set is spare, featuring a number of wooden boxes created by local artist Migiwa Orimo, and a table and three chairs in front of a white screen. Floating between the table and the screen is a large tree branch, which fell out of a tree in Smith’s backyard. The artists said they felt the fallen branch was perfect for the play, which incorporates elements of the natural world into its text.
At the same time, using the branch for the set felt like a metaphor for the way they’ve co-written the play — by observing and incorporating what comes to them naturally.
“You have this intention of making art about things you’re really, deeply engaged with — and then the world shows up with this thing and says, ‘There you go,’” Smith said.
Olesker, Pettitt and Smith all said the play is oriented by process and discovery, and its text — and the movement and silence the characters sometimes adopt on stage — reflects that orientation. “The Language of Dolls,” then, is a work that feels “very alive” to the three artists who have, and are, creating it.
“There is something [in the play] that is open and receptive to a possibility, and I think that makes it alive,” Pettitt said.
Openness and possibility to the questions the play poses between its characters, the three artists hope, will help audiences — as it has helped the artists themselves — gain a better understanding of those questions and what motivates them.
They noted, however, that understanding and answers aren’t the same thing.
“I don’t think we answer the questions,” Olesker said. “There’s not closure.”
Pettitt added: “Nobody can tell us the answer to the question — but I want to stay in front of the question, not run away from it. … I think that’s what we’ve watched each other do on stage over these many years. … So it’s a fun performance and a safe performance, but it’s a daring one. That’s the joy of it.”
“The Language of Dolls” will be performed Friday and Saturday, Oct. 18 and 19, at 7 p.m.; and Sunday, Oct. 20, at 2 p.m. Tickets are $20 for general admission and $5 for youth and Antioch College students. Tickets are available in advance online at bit.ly/FoundryTix25.
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