Thomas MacMillan Photo
Searching for the remains of a 19th-century match factory in Westville, Ian Alderman found a home for his growing grassroots theater company — and the perfect Halloween haunt for his latest ghost story.
The company, A Broken Umbrella Theatre is in the midst of a three-weekend run of its latest production, entitled “A Play With Matches.”
The play tells the story of local industrialist Ebenezer Beecher, who revolutionized the process of making matches in 1852 from a factory on Blake Street in Westville. The show melds Westville’s present with a couple of its pasts — the 1960s and the 1880s — and includes supernatural touches suited for the Halloween season.
“A Play With Matches” builds on the troupe’s trademark practice of site-specific shows drawn from New Haven history. The play is performed in the long out-of-use furnace room of a factory that sat just across the street from Beecher’s former match factory.
In another way, the latest production marks a departure for the company. In the past, A Broken Umbrella has set up shop only temporarily—under a bridge, for example, or in an old Vaudeville hall. In between, the troupe has rehearsed and built sets out Alderman’s Westville garage, or borrowed space elsewhere.
But A Broken Umbrella won’t be abandoning the boiler room after “A Play With Matches.” The space will be the company’s new headquarters as it continues to create site-specific pieces throughout New Haven.
The latest production also marks a Broken Umbrella milestone as the company’s most “complex and ambitious and whole work that we’ve done,” Alderman said. “We worked longer on this than on any other play.” For one thing, it’s the first A Broken Umbrella production to have a printed program.
The new headquarters and growing ambitions are emblematic of a burgeoning, successful theater company. The 25-member group has hit upon a winning combination of reaching into New Haven history and bringing the past to life, often with a spooky Halloween edge. Its method has proved to be a good match for the local community, which has responded with grants, donations, and awards.
On a recent afternoon, Alderman offered a tour of A Broken Umbrella’s new digs, which he hit upon this summer, just by looking in the window. He had been in the area scouting the site of Beecher’s original match factory, in what is now an early learning center. He knew he wanted to do a story about the industrialist, a “Willy Wonka figure” who was the first to mechanize match production. Before his innovations, matches were laboriously whittled and dipped by hand.
Alderman had first heard of Beecher in his high school classmate Colin Caplan’s book about the history of Westville. He had learned that Beecher lived nearby in a mansion on the hilltop where the Westville public library now stands. When the mansion was taken down in the 1960s, myriad secret passages and hidden chambers were discovered, Alderman said. Beecher had hidden away his many patents around the house.
Alderman said he was fascinated by that story, and knew it contained the seeds of a Halloween play.
Broken Umbrella headquarters.
Across the street from what was the Diamond match company, Alderman looked in the window of a building characterized by a giant smokestack, the former furnace room of a now-gone sewing machine factory, one that Beecher helped to get off the ground.
A Broken Umbrella signed a lease on the space this summer, and created a theater around the base of that smokestack. Inside, the room has been transformed into a corner of the old Beecher mansion, complete with hidden trapdoors and secret rooms.
Over the past months, writer Jason Patrick Wells has collaborated with the rest of the company to dramatize the story of Ebenezer Beecher into a tale that Aldermen described as “Scooby Doo meets The Goonies meets Back To The Future.”
The play warps from the 19th century to the 1960s, when a fictional inventor makes a pilgrimage to the Beecher mansion and finds, in ghostly Halloween fashion, that the past is not the past.
Dana Astmann Photo
Ryan Gardner as Ebenezer Beecher.
Beecher was a brilliant inventor who built a match-making empire, Alderman said. At its height between the 1850s and the 1890s, the factory was “like Yale,” he said. It employed most of the people in town.
But Beecher’s success came at a price. He started as a generous entrepreneur who helped others with their inventions only to have his ideas stolen from him. As described in the play, Beecher eventually becomes a reclusive figure, distrustful of people and wracked with guilt that his own match factory left workers with “phossy jaw.”
Match-makers were exposed to phosphorous, which led to necrosis of the jaw and a condition in which affected bones would glow green. “Great Halloween material,” said Alderman, who promised that glowing bones have a role in the play.
The show runs for two more weekends of performances at 8 p.m. on Friday, and 3 and 7 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday at 446A Blake Street. Tickets are $20 reserved and $15 at the door, to ensure that seats will still be available for spontaneous theater-goers. Student tickets are $10. The Sunday matinees are pay-what-you-can shows.
Alderman said A Broken Umbrella strives to make its shows accessible to all. “We do not want money to get in the way.”
To that end, the company is an all-volunteer operation.
As it has grown over the past several years, A Broken Umbrella has been supported by grants and donations, including an arts grant from the mayor’s office, a grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and a variety of deals and freebies from local businesses, from dry cleaning to program printing. Six different restaurants feed the cast and crew between weekend shows.
“People seem to believe in the mission of exploring our own community history,” Alderman said.