Heartsparkle Players creates connection through improvised stories

The Heartsparkle Players don’t just make art. The theater group works to create connection and understanding.

Friday night (May 13), the group will celebrate 25 years of using playback theater to bring people’s stories to life.

On visits to schools, nonprofit organizations and businesses, and at monthly public performances at Traditions Cafe & World Folk Art, the players listen to audience members’ stories and then act them out, improvising to retell each story and illuminate its meaning.

“Playback is about people telling stories and hearing each other’s stories,” said Debe Edden, who founded Heartsparkle 35 years ago and is its artistic and managing director. “We have an opportunity to relate to their stories and relate to the feelings and relate to the experiences.”

The performances include music and dialogue, and sometimes actors portray important objects in a story and people and animals.

“I’ve been cars and rubber bands and all kinds of things,” member Elizabeth Lord said. “It’s very silly sometimes, but it can help tell the story.”

Playback theater, developed in 1975 in New York, provides lots of opportunities for creativity, Lord said, recalling a performance during a new-student orientation at The Evergreen State College. A student compared one of his high school teachers to a toad, and Lord, portraying the teacher, chose to take it literally.

“We had these boxes, and I got up on a box and squatted down like a frog,” she said. “It’s improv, so the other actors weren’t quite sure what I was up to. When it was time for the part with the teacher, I croaked and moved like a frog and then stood up and played the teacher.”

She’s had powerful experiences with the group, too. She still remembers acting out a story years ago for rape survivors in the support group the Rape Response Coalition.

The storytellers get to select the actor who’ll portray them in their story, and a woman who’d been raped chose Lord.

“I’ll always remember that,” the actress said. “I was exhausted afterwards. It’s not like I was running laps, but there was something so precious, so personal. You want to do it just right, and you also don’t want to retraumatize the storyteller.

“Portraying her was an honor and a challenge.”

Five of the players have been working together for 18 years: Edden, Lord, Aeryk Bjork, Lydia Beth Leimbach and Sara Rucker-Thiessen. The other two core members are Bob McKenziesullivan and Hari Nath.

“I’ve been with the group so long they’ve become like family,” Lord said. “Because we’ve been doing improv together for so long, it’s like we’re dance partners. We work together so smoothly we look rehearsed. It’s very satisfying.”

For that same 18 years, the players also have been providing training and support for another group of actors, the Thunders, made up of young adults with developmental disabilities. The Thunders join the Heartsparkle Players onstage for many performances, and the two groups have been collaborating on telling stories of compassionate action at North Thurston Schools.

“We invite students to tell stories of times when they have been compassionate towards someone and taken an action and times when others have done that for them,” Edden said.

“When we have people onstage who have disabilities, the students have responses to that,” she said. “There are children in the audience who have disabilities as well, who see themselves reflected on the stage and then feel able to tell their own stories.

“They come up and tell a story, and then the students in the audience see them in a different way. Many things are happening at once.”

This story was originally published May 12, 2016 at 1:55 PM with the headline "Heartsparkle Players creates connection through improvised stories."