It’s 6 a.m. on Aug. 2 and Will MacAdams is behind the wheel of a beat-up van headed to Warwick, a rural town on the border of New York and New Jersey. “We have to leave early, otherwise we’ll hit traffic and won’t have as good a chance of catching the farmers on their breaks,” he tells me as I stifle a yawn. MacAdams should know: a director, playwright and performer, he has been working for two years on The Black Dirt Cycle, a series of plays based on Warwick’s history and present-day farming culture. The first piece, Water and Stone, created in July 2010, was based on interviews with agricultural workers and other Warwick residents about their relationship to the land and seasonal cycles. Blending music with dance and using a mix of actors, non-actors and local schoolchildren, Water and Stone was performed outdoors during the Warwick Summer Arts Festival atop Pennings Orchard, a charming market with an adjacent orchard and a stunning view of Warwick Valley.
Two plays later, MacAdams continues to make the 90-minute drive from his New York City residence on a regular basis. Why keep returning to Warwick? Over the past 15 years, MacAdams’s work—inspired in a major way by Jennie Hahn, of Maine’s Open Waters Theatre Arts—has sprawled across the U.S., South Africa and Indonesia. “Jennie’s company has facilitated an organic development process and created beautiful, locally grown, vitally alive theatre,” MacAdams tells me as the sun begins to rise over the Ramapo Mountains. “I’ve done a lot of community-based theatre that didn’t create roots in a place. So often that kind of work can feel mercenary. I felt like my work wasn’t deepening and wanted to create art that could be sustainable.” In short, MacAdams was an artist in search of a community.
A friend suggested the “black dirt region” of New York, so called for the dark soil left behind by an ancient glacial lake and the flooding of the Wallkill River. The region, which spans 26,000 acres from southern Orange County in New York into Sussex County of New Jersey, boasts some of the most fertile ground in the United States outside the Florida Everglades. “Not only is the soil rich, but the history of the area is rich, too,” MacAdams notes with a crinkly smile.
“Water and Stone was sort of my introduction to Warwick, in which I told residents why I had come to their community, while including their stories in the performance,” recalls MacAdams. The next project in the cycle, The Legend of Lucía Zenteno/La Leyenda de Lucía Zenteno, was an adaptation of a Zapotec folk story created by MacAdams with third, fourth and fifth graders from the WHEDCo after-school program in the South Bronx, along with adults from the Farmworkers Community Center of Goshen, N.Y., near Warwick. Performed in January 2011 by students and farm workers in English and Spanish with drumming and poetry, Legend took as its theme “What My Hands Have Done Today.”
The latest entry in the cycle, Bountiful, features MacAdams as a solo performer telling stories he gathered when he worked as a farmhand. Narrated with rascally cheek from the point of view of the soil, Bountiful is a studied look at the people who have come from many backgrounds to work Warwick’s land throughout history.
MacAdams has performed Bountiful at Word Up! Bookstore in his own Washington Heights in New York City, on Warwick farms during lunch breaks, at the Warwick Summer Arts Festival and at the Ramapough Lenape Tribal Headquarters. Most recently he toured the show to farmers’ markets around New York City and New Haven, Conn. Bountiful is both entertaining and educational, prompting onlookers to consider how many hands have touched the cilantro they toss into their guacamole. “My son is not a big vegetable fan,” says Pam Koch, executive director of the Center for Food & Environment at Teachers College of Columbia University, with whom I spoke after my trip upstate. “But after we saw Bountiful at the 114th Street market, my son said he would rather eat food touched by many hands than made by a machine in a factory.”
The choice to make Bountiful a solo piece represents an evolution in MacAdams’s concept of community-based art. “The biggest lesson I’ve learned is the relationship between my voice and community’s voice,” MacAdams tells me as we pull off the highway and wind through a series of back roads. He points out that for the first two sections of the Black Dirt Cycle, he silenced his own voice in deference to the community. “I realized that wasn’t useful. Now I feel like my own creative voice can be a part of the story,” he allows.
MacAdams and I come to a rattling halt in a dirt parking log next to an ice cream shop. To get a better sense of the history of Warwick and its unique geological features, MacAdams and I plan to meet first with Everett Cox, one of the few locals who has seen all three installments of The Black Dirt Cycle. Cox grew up near Warwick beside Greenwood Forest Farms, which for many years acted as a Catskills-esque resort for wealthy African-Americans escaping the heat of summers in New York City. As we head toward a picnic table overlooking the valley where Cox is waiting, MacAdams whispers, “Everett speaks to the soul of the land, for me.”
Cox begins with what amounts to an informal lecture, describing how the Ramapo Mountains were at one time higher than the Himalayas are today. During the Ice Age, a glacier two miles thick moved across the region. Between bites of his breakfast sandwich, Cox describes how one inch of the top soil deposited by this geological phenomenon counts for 1,000 years that the dirt sat beneath the ice. Growing up, Cox’s parents had a farm in the area, and eventually part of that farm was sold for development. “I remember asking my parents, ‘How could you sell 12,000 years of soil? Was it worth it?’” This is one of the stories, MacAdams confides, that he included in Water and Stone.
Taking our leave of Cox, we head into town to meet with the mayor of Warwick, Michael Newhard, who is a visual artist when he’s not overseeing local politics. When MacAdams first visited Warwick and attended a farmers’ breakfast, residents told him to look for the mayor at Newhard’s Home Source, which has been run by his family since 1968. “I remember telling Will about the Warwick arts festival,” says Newhard from behind a desk piled high with folders and paper. “When Will asked where the stage was, I told him, ‘The whole town’s the stage!’” For Newhard, the vibrancy of Warwick’s artistic community dates back to the 1950s, when Warwick Playhouse was in its heyday and stars like Richard Kiley and Gretchen Wyler would visit from New York City.
Next MacAdams introduces me to a present-day Warwick artist, Gar Wang, who designed the felt vegetable hat MacAdams dons when he performs Bountiful. Wang is preparing to go on vacation with her husband, but graciously welcomes us into her studio overlooking a pond to show us her felt creations. “This scarf uses silk—see the inconsistencies and holes?” she says of a diaphanous purple and white confection. The vegetable hat features a red pepper, an onion and a leaf of chard, while the dark brown soil portion falls down around the ears in a nod to current fashion.
Wang needs to finish packing, so MacAdams and I head for Pennings Orchard to meet with Jean Beattie May, the Warwick Village historian, and actor Suzy Stage. Stage, who performed in Water and Stone and whose brother owns and operates Applewood Winery and Orchards, describes how migrant workers used to live in dorm-style housing on farms. “Nowadays people aren’t as migrant,” she explains, pointing to stricter laws and a culture of fear that has recently cropped up among workers. Talking about The Black Dirt Cycle, she says, “The goal of these plays is to connect stories of people who grow and pick food to people who consume that food. It’s dehumanizing that we don’t know who has picked our food.”
“It’s about creating gratitude for the soil and the people who work it—and about celebrating this land,” MacAdams chimes in, admitting that initial versions of Bountiful were slightly too somber in tone. To develop the piece (and as a challenge to himself), MacAdams has set out to perform the 20-minute monologue that comprises the show every day prior to the opening of the Warwick Summer Arts Festival.
The sun is climbing in the sky and we leave Pennings to see if we can find a man MacAdams got to know during his stint as a farmhand. MacAdams is worried because his friend recently complained of an ear infection that might have affected his ability to work. We pull onto an onion farm where the root vegetables are getting dumped from one machine to the next. We draw looks as we approach the processing equipment. One senses this isn’t the kind of a farm where social calls are regular.
“He’s not here!” a man shouts from atop a loud machine. MacAdams tries to ask a few questions but receives curt replies. We get back in the van. “That was weird,” MacAdams sighs. “I hope he’s all right. I really hope that didn’t just get him into any kind of trouble.”
It’s late afternoon, but we haven’t yet met with college student Gaby Ramirez, a 19-year-old resident of the area who painted a mural on the wheelbarrow that serves as Bountiful’s backdrop. “Gaby’s like an ad hoc dramaturg,” MacAdams explains. “It’s so important to me to have a collaborator in this process who has worked in the fields herself.”
We arrive at Gaby’s house, which sits at the edge of an expanse of sod farms. While she looks after her five-year-old younger brother, we sit in the backyard sipping soft drinks. “Wait, wait, wait, has Eliza even seenthe play yet?” Ramirez asks MacAdams with an edge of teenage incredulity. I have not. So Ramirez challenges MacAdams to live up to his self-imposed rule of performing the monologue once a day.
Usually soft-spoken and exuding the serene energy of a guru, MacAdams transitions into performance mode, full of wide-eyed energy. The play begins with MacAdams’s own backstory, then takes a surreal turn when he begins to hear the Black Dirt speak. The Black Dirt turns out to be a rapscallion kind of character with an infectiously enjoyable cartoon voice. Other characters include a Lenape Native American woman, an immigrant from Poland, a migrant worker from Mexico, an American with Volga-German ancestry, and a young woman whose life straddles Texas and Mexico. Ramirez and I share sly giggles throughout the performance. It’s clear the show’s subject matter and style would work for audiences of any age. Afterwards, Ramirez gives her collaborator some frank feedback: “You need to make the sections between the German and the Polish characters more clear,” she directs. MacAdams takes hasty notes. The sun is getting lower and we still have one more visit to make: Liz Reese, the producer and artistic director of the Warwick Summer Arts Festival.
Reese is getting ready to teach a lesson in Alexander technique when we arrive at her warm, welcoming home, which has a horse stable and vegetable garden attached. In 2000 she received funding from New York State Council of the Arts to create a festival in Warwick about arts and technology. A former NYC-based artist, Reese knows how to stretch a budget and use non-conventional spaces. Over the years, the festival has moved away from using traditional theatre spaces because Reese believes that makes community members more apt to participate. “Space can be a character in site-specific work,” she enthuses. “People have deep associations with the land around here. These performances can start an incredible dialogue. So many histories are embedded in the soil.”
Reese tells me the town of Warwick has been very supportive of the festival, now in its second decade. Reese’s acting student is about to arrive, but she insists I don’t head back to the city empty-handed and presses zucchini and tomatoes into my hands.
When I reconnect with MacAdams in October I ask how Bountiful has developed and how the performances in farmers’ markets have gone. He points out that since Hurricane Irene in August, Bountiful has become particularly timely, helping to raise awareness about the devastating effects of the storm. The Black Dirt region was particularly hard hit as it is a low-lying valley—an estimated $45 million was lost in crop production alone. “It feels really important to be doing this work now,” MacAdams maintains.
This month MacAdams will travel to Mexico and meet the friends and relatives of certain farm workers he got to know in Warwick. He will return there again in March to attend the Hemispheric Encuentro academic conference as a representative of Alternate ROOTS, acommunity-based artists’ organization in the South and Southeastern U.S. For the first trip, MacAdams plans to take formal language courses. His Spanish, though proficient, is far from fluent—and he believes that’s the key to making his next leap into the work he’s doing in Warwick. “Even though I’ve been working on this cycle for two years, I feel like it’s only halfway done,” he says. “One of the least developed stories is that of the farm workers—that’s a very closed community, and for good reason.”
For now, further installments of The Black Dirt Cycle will wait while MacAdams delves into writing a project for Cornerstone Theater Company’s 2012 summer institute. He will uproot himself long enough to spend time in the California region where Grapes of Wrath was set, listening to stories of Dust Bowl migrants and recent immigrants from Mexico, and seeing how the groups’ migration stories connect in the fields. But he’s happy to take time to reflect on the Cycle and pleased with how far it has come.
“Especially in the wake of the hurricane, I’ve realized that the most important thing to do is to tell the story of the region. That’s a contribution that’s worthy and has a practical effect. It’s so easy to make farmers and farm workers out to be victims, but they aren’t victims at all—they are proud, resilient people.”
