Port Oneida Fair features plays by Anne-Marie Oomen

By Norm Wheeler

Sun editor

Prolific local poet, memoirist, essayist and playwright Anne-Marie Oomen creates an enduring sense of place and history. From her memoirs about growing up in Oceana County (100 miles south of Leelanau), to poems that capture the magic of the Sleeping Bear Dunes and the western Michigan lakeshore, to history plays that re-create local characters and bygone times, Oomen’s work is always infused with images of the hills and the forests, the barns and the orchards, and the dirt and the compost of her native land.

After leaving Michigan many years ago for a short time, she landed in Leelanau County. “My first inclination was to find the sense of place that was genuine Leelanau and that could match my strong sense of Oceana County where I grew up,” she recalls. “I wanted to take pleasure in making Leelanau my home in the same way that Oceana was my home as a child.” In researching the history of this place, she discovered that “the people who make that history come alive. That process nurtures creativity and imagination, and it led me to want to write plays about these characters who give history its life.” In the early 1990s she wrote Northern Belles, “a kind of loose history of women farmers. Writing that established the idea of the narrative use of poetry to tell a story that feels like a play.”

Then she discovered the story of Bertha Peth, the last woman to leave South Manitou Island when the National Lakeshore was established. “She was married to John Hutsler and she had lost a child.” The play Barta’s Path was performed at Old Town Playhouse in Traverse City as well as in St. Louis and Iowa City. Next, Oomen’s research on King James Jesse Strang and the Mormon presence on Beaver Island became the play Wives of an American King that was staged at Old Town Playhouse and also in the church on Beaver Island by the Beaver Island Players.

This summer two of Oomen’s history pieces will be performed as part of the Port Oneida Fair, sponsored by Preserve Historic Sleeping Bear and the Port Oneida Fair Committee with a grant from the Michigan Humanities Council.

“A Stone That Rises came out of research on the Olsen Farm. First, I wrote an Olsen House monologue where the house talks through its history. Then I got curious about the Burfiend Family through local historian Tom VanZoeren’s interviews. (The Leelanau Players staged A Stone That Rises with Rose Hollander and yours truly as Elizabeth and Carsten Burfiend, and Oomen and I have also performed it all over Michigan as a staged reading.) The two Burfiend houses still stand along Port Oneida Road on the bluff between the Port Oneida Schoolhouse and Camps Leelanau & Kohahna. A Stone That Rises recounts the trials and perseverance of the first white settlers to the area, and the influence of Thomas Kelderhouse and other local families in establishing the Port Oneida community.

“There is a difficulty with authenticity that history plays contain,” Oomen explains. “You have to use tons of imagination to make interesting characters and still be true to the history. You don’t really know the people in the family, so who knows what the real details were? The mundane facts get tempered by the imagining that interesting characterization requires. A writer has to filter history through the lens of the present in order to bring it to life, and that may differ from the past. That’s the paradox of writing about history; it is filtered through the present so that it can appeal to the audience, and that’s important!”

After presenting A Stone That Rises at the Thoreson Farm Barn at 6:30 on Friday, August 12, the Beach Bards & Co will present Oomen’s play Aral: A Folk Opera, combining narration and live music. The story of a double murder in the ghost town of Aral where a sawmill sat at the mouth of Otter Creek at the end of Esch Road, Aral: A Folk Opera takes us back to the final days of the logging era at the end of the 1890s. The Beach Bards, together with The Lizard Lickers, presented Aral: A Folk Opera many times from 1998-2002 at the Platte River Campground, as part of the Manitou Music Festival for the Glen Arbor Art Center, and at Interlochen Arts Academy in Corson Auditorium for Earth Day with Song of the Lakes. This reunion of Beach Bard actors with some of the Lizard Lickers plus some new musicians promises to be a jubilant celebration of two of Oomen’s most travelled history plays.

“I haven’t done any of these history plays since 2010,” Oomen muses. “When you re-imagine history for a contemporary audience, you find a new understanding of human impulses and the way of seeing the arc of life. Could these be dated because they are two decades old? I loved doing the research, but if I wrote them today I would probably do them differently because we are in a different time. Isn’t that weird? In the same way that we are always planning for and interacting with the future, we are interacting with the past. For a writer, that’s an ever-shifting inspiration.”