“Salt of the Earth Players”

~Chaperones through Time and Place~

Interpretive Educational Living Street Theater for the City of Trenton, NJ

The genre of street theater is quite old and varied. Trenton’s Barracks provides the stage for true re-enactment theater.  However, as one passes beyond its courtyard, the challenge of educational street theater becomes quite daunting in a thoroughly ‘urban’ downtown state capital setting.  While quite far from presenting an architecturally coherent sector, such as Philadelphia’s National Historic Park District (with adjacent Society Hill and its relatively unchanged period buildings), Trenton’s State Capitol building has within a walking perimeter of just over two blocks the residual of a colonial town, with hundreds of stories nested among a diversity of architectural landmarks.

Jane Jacobs’ Walks

Urban sociologist/economist Jane Jacobs is the namesake for a type of urban guided tour in which visitors are provided maps leading them on a walk from site to site through a city landscape, where they either meet docents or guides, or discover placards with QR-codes (or other audio-visuals) to support their attention and provide educational ‘nourishment.’  

In the case of Trenton, despite being the state capital with hundreds of state workers in its modern high-rises, the downtown pedestrian traffic more closely resembles that of a bus terminal than a metropolis. From a positive view, half of the pedestrians one encounters are poor city residents transferring buses walking from one downtown bus stop to another. Except for a rare state worker scurrying from a bank ATM, the rest of its sidewalks are street-corner habitues, shady dealers, and angry belligerents continuing a disjointed verbal barrage, or simply looking for a fight. On week-ends when all state workers are home in the suburbs, that a staff of personal guides or docents be readily available as friendly ‘chaperones’ from Trenton’s historic sites to site.     

Armed with an IPad to hold up as they point to a building (or where a building once was), digital reconstructions of Warren St., Broad St., Academy and East Hanover and Montgomery Streets for at least three periods of Trenton’s history will be available to the chaperones (colonial, 1830’s, 1900’s). 1

Street Theater Guides

Combining the concept of the Jane Jacobs’ walk, with street theater one might encounter at a Renaissance Fair or Colonial Williamsburg to draw a crowd to a scheduled event such as an outdoor court trial, or cannon demonstration, we will turn the entire path of the “walking tour” into an impromptu living stage with habitue’s and hangers-on of our own.  The street theater is proposed whose goal is to engage visitors in a theatrical game that allows stories about individuals and events covering three hundred years of Trenton history to be conveyed by a roving cast of often motley street players.  Working no more than a one-block area to either side of a brightly-marked “station,”2 visitors will be able to identify the closest chaperone by their iconic prop –a collection of hats hanging from their shoulder or belt. Waiting at the station where the schedule of players is displayed, they can scan a QR-code to see and hear a story and description of the place they are at, or wait for their guide to show up, creating a comfort-zone as they move from guide-to-guide through the urban wasteland of modern-day Trenton.3 

All but two 4of “The Salt of the Earth Players” will amplify the normally spotty pedestrian traffic of street people, only the Players will be helpful and exuberant, a motley crew of out-of-work gossips. They will be guides appear out of nowhere and seem to know everything that has ever gone on in the town. As they tell stories passed on from their grandparents, they will be able to change hats and become their look-alike from a century or two hundred years before.5  At the same time, they will be able to step out of character, taking on the educational frame and become a historical docent that can answer questions about the setting, the architecture, the town or the program itself.  

The Salt of the Earth Players will develop a typical Hollywood premise from time-travel movies,6  that is, when the film’s heroes find themselves in another century and meet “guides” who can drop in and out of time periods with ease.  After experiencing their first such guide, visitors will soon realize it is a game—for any trained chaperone will have dozens of stories pertinent to the tour from across three hundred years.  Participating will mean getting to the next site, if that is deemed more interesting than one’s guide.  Guides’ however, will be trained in theatrical techniques to break in on a fellow guide to move things along.  

The guiding principle of this ad hoc street theater, however, is that docents consider their educational goal as being a participatory theatrical experience in which visitors obtain perspectives  (new interpretive skills) and knowledges that can serve them as members of a democratic society. Salt of the Earth Players will tell stories, in an entertaining manner, which paint a picture of different people’s values– how values may conflict, how values may be lost or destroyed, confused or destroyed.

Recruiting and Casting the Salt of the Earth Players

While the project may begin with college-age docents, it is hoped that The Salt of the Earth Players will attract theatrical amateurs of every age. The challenge is unique. Every player/chaperone will be given a character name with a backstory to build on, however it is expected that they develop their character’s idiosyncrasies and the particulars of the backstories in their ancestor-trail to suit their own talents and personality.  A talented musician, for example, is not to be ruled out. 

The development of tall tales about their ancestor’s exploits is also possible, so that after a season of street-corner story-telling, an illustrated comic book of that character’s adventures in Trenton might be envisioned, creating a mythology for the downtown similar to what the Sharon Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels have done for Chambersburg.  With this enhancement in mind, recruitment for amateur actors can be expanded to those considering authorship, or breaking into the comic-book arena.7

THOUGHTS on the issue of Quality Control and Training

The genre is EMPHATICALLY NOT the same as re-enactors at the Barracks, and the standards of historicity will be clearly distinct from the historical exhibits inside any of the buildings where there is a true framework to hold to and interpret.  This is closer to the street theater at the Renaissance Fair, where re-enactors interrupt and regale one another with crude street-corner niceties, providing a feel for the realities of Elizabethan England.

Understanding that theatrical considerations will sometimes place entertainment and audience engagement above literal representations of the times,  artifacts, costumes, comedic audience “asides” (outside the frame) are understood as part of theater.  However, certain persons COULD NOT HAVE SAID CERTAIN THINGS, and to allude to it in theater is a distortion.  We need a way to make caricatures into art, and not create mere cartoon history… nor turn it into cultural counter-history.   

The ambition is to iteratively develop (through trial and error) a set of quality guidelines to govern this experiment in educational entertainment.  

The theatrical training standard is less that of “acting” than teaching our historical escorts to enjoy history AND the challenge of finding new ways to pass their excitement and enthusiasm to anyone willing to look at the town through a several pairs of spectacles. 

  1. The Hunter Research map of 1775 Trenton residents will be key to the colonial / Revolutionary War period.  ↩︎
  2. Stations would be identifiable either by one of the uniquely colored downtown “welcome flags” currently affixed to every other lamp-post, or by bright-scolored signage on the curb-side surface of existing parking kiosks.  ↩︎
  3. The problem has been stated as an extreme; to overcome a perception of downtown Trenton for the local suburbanite whose reticence must be overcome –where many will not set foot in the town for fear of being accosted, and others who will come to the State House campus or the Trenton Thunder stadium, will not dare venture beyond the parking lot. To hear the chaperone system described in the above manner may allay fears and spark curiosity, which means the system must be designed with perception in mind.  The practicality of cast interactivity, and the players’ abilities to maintain and meet educational objectives is a critical feature of the experimental design. ↩︎
  4. Two first-person re-enactors are planned for the cast. Jacob Francis, a young free black man from Amwell who served in the Continental Army in the siege of Boston, and served in Sullivan’s Regiment through the New York campaign to the First Battle of Trenton, after which he returned to Amwell and fought in the Monmouth Militia. The second re-enactor will be a visiting Quaker from the mid-19th century, able to tell the inner story of Quaker faith, but also familiar with a particularly intriguing story associated with the Chesterfield meeting–that of the origin of the Jersey Devil, and its very odd relationship to the origin of Ben Frankllin’s famous Poor Richard’s Almanac… which he stole from a Quaker astrologer thrown out of the Chesterfield meeting for his devilish writings. For Franklin stole his Almanac from the one associated with the fatherhood of the infamous Jersey Devil.   ↩︎
  5. While this seems extremely far-fetched, it is merely a comedic treatment of a standard premise in many modern comic-books [e.g. Daredevil, Echo, Werewolf at Night, etc], where an arch-villain from the past has been able to channel through an individual who is an exact replica their great ancestor. ↩︎
  6.  Such as “Time Bandits’, “Back to the Future,” and Terry Gilliam’s “Baron von Munchausen” ↩︎
  7.  FOR EXAMPLE, A BACKSTORY MIGHT BE:  Tom ‘da Tooth Pain has a family that originally hailed from Bordentown. While they knew the more famous Tom Paine (‘who spelled it with an ‘E’) the author of Common Sense hired their ancestor William to care for his horse, ‘Buttons,’ and always called him ‘Willem’ Penn’ in a jokin’ way.  The family moved to Trenton by the 1830’s….worked here & there in ceramics, moved to Lamberton and great-grandpa –nicknamed ‘The Shoulder’ because he hauled cable for the Roeblings…well ‘ol Shoulder Pain…… etc. He told a Roebling story you wouldn’t believe…… etc. ↩︎