Third book in The Freep Investigates Mysteries Series is finally out, ready early for next Christmas: Midwinter's Drama - A Theater Mystery Novel, for middle grades, teens and tweens.
The kids join a community theater production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in Midwinter. Like the rest of the Scooby-Doo-style series, there's a ghost story in the history of the one-room schoolhouse now used as a little theater, and then strange mishaps haunt the production. The Freep reporters have to discover the secret cause now, or the show will be cancelled!
The Shakespeare original is sufficient inspiration for all kinds of stories, but these author's notes capture some of the local and personal history behind the fictional Midwinter's Drama.
I Was in a Play
If opportunity presents, participate in a live theater performance—onstage or backstage, in your school or community, or as the audience!
I was a tall child, almost always the tallest in the class. Everyone wanted to be the tallest, and they were always measuring themselves against me to check. My best buddy then was small and cute. Teachers called us "Mutt and Jeff". Mutt and Jeff were a pair of physically mismatched friends in one of the first newspaper daily comic strips.
When I was in fifth grade, about ten years old, I had a starring role in a school play. It was a musical, The Seven Old Ladies of Lavender Town. (The "Operetta in Two Parts" by H.C. Bunner is in the public domain and currently available as a free download from Forgotten Books.)
I volunteered to play the part of The Duchess in the school musical. My best friend volunteered to be The Fairy. But then we found out that one person had to play both parts, because the Duchess is revealed to be the Fairy in disguise. My friend really wanted the part. The teacher assigned both roles to me, figuring I could play the fairy more easily than my short friend could play the duchess. She had to play one of the old ladies.
My costume was simple. I wore a pleated gauze skirt and a satin blouse. It was my Easter dress. Because I had big feet, (adult size), and because grown up women did not wear flat shoes that year, my dress shoes had heels. The only thing I remember about the play was how the audience gasped when the curtains opened to reveal that I was really the Fairy! The transformation was marked only by a cape made of lace with glittering threads, worn around the shoulders of my same dress.
I tell this story because of the cat fight in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream between Helena and Hermia, the tall and small jokes. The theme sparks a subplot within Midwinter's Drama, where everyone is still growing, and adolescent performers may hide budding anxieties about size, shape, and competition for attention.
Both my own children performed in their middle school musicals. My daughter didn't get the lead she read for, but as one of the more mature looking girls, played one of the mothers.
My son and his buddy decided in eighth grade, the year they were graduating to go up to high school, that they would do every school activity offered before they left "childhood" behind. They were awarded very funny roles in a musical which played more like a comedy variety show. Their ridiculous costumes, (involving a farmer and his pig), were a perfect fit for their spontaneous shenanigans.
My daughter eventually performed in multiple productions, as cast or crew—even as Dramaturg—in college theater. We got to meet theater people!
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| The farm next door |
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| The Little Red Schoolhouse |
One Room Schoolhouse
As a child, my daughter had participated in a youth community theater program run by a warm and talented young adult student named Miranda. Miranda's teenaged brother helped out too. My kid performed as Amponsah, the narrator of a series of Anansi stories.
The troupe rehearsed and performed in our town's Little Red Schoolhouse, built in 1873. This schoolhouse was the first in the area built to serve as a tuition-free public school following New Jersey's 1871 Free School Bill. The new law made public school free, with compulsory attendance, nine months a year, for children ages 5 to 18; it established a school tax to pay for the schools. The one room served grades 1-8 for two local municipalities. It served as a school until 1950. The building is now used as a community resource. The schoolhouse is next to preserved farmland and across from the flood plain where cows graze.
When little "Amponsah" grew up, she worked for some time as a historic interpreter playing, among other roles, the schoolteacher in the historic one-room Bunker Hill School, relocated to and preserved at the Red Mill Museum Village in Clinton, New Jersey.
Ice Skating
When we had winters here, our family and friends skated outdoors on local ponds and even on our own backyard, which used to flood and then freeze into a glassy freeway!
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| Author's Brother on Frozen Yard |
Homeschool
Before I even had children, I was interested in the homeschooling movement. My children did ultimately attend fine schools, after preschool education at home. I remained involved with homeschoolers through my family law work, through friendships with some of my favorite families, and as a children's librarian.
All these experiences contribute to Midwinter's Drama, but this story is fiction. Not even the schoolhouse in the story is identical to the real one, but an imaginary composite of many American one-room schoolhouses. The children in the Freep mysteries are mostly homage to the children, ethnically and economically diverse, whom I taught in church classes, in schools and at the library.
Shakespeare for You
A Midsummer Night's Dream is often children's first exposure to Shakespeare. They may have to read it, in middle school or high school English classes; or maybe at an even younger age, they have the opportunity, with their family, to see the play performed. Perhaps the fairies are considered appealing to children, or the themes of love, law, and competition, suitable for teens.
My family has seen the play many times, performed and set in both Midsummer, and Midwinter, in ancient Greece, or in Victorian England.
I hope the summary, quotations, and explorations of its plot in Midwinter's Drama: A Theater Novel help young readers enjoy and understand the play.
You can find and read the entire play for free online at Folger Shakespeare Library.
Other Shakespeare enjoyable for children, (at least my children fondly remember these!), include, believe it or not: King Lear, (there was a storm outside the theater just as the storm raged onstage, and my little boy especially enjoyed the Fool); and The Tempest, with shipwreck, sorcery, monsters, and love, on a desert island.
Teens are often required to read or see Romeo and Juliet. Also popular are Macbeth, with its witches and war, and Hamlet, with its ghost.
In books of poetry for children, Shakespeare's is often included. In third grade, my son had to memorize a poem. He was inspired by this one from Shakespeare's Richard II:
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…
Now that gives me a pang of nostalgia for national pride.