Air Temple Arts Goes To ​“California”

Aerial routines. Juggling. Tumbling. All in the service of telling the real and tragic story of the Donner Party, a group of wagon-train settlers who, in 1846, tried to get to California from the Midwest but were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846 – 47; those who survived did so by resorting to cannibalism. This was the vision of director Liz Richards, who, with the help of a crew of New Haven artists, will bring that vision to life as Heaven or California, performed at Air Temple Arts on July 10.

The idea for Heaven or California began about four years ago. ​“I’m a fan of this podcast Last Podcast on the Left, and they did a series about the Donner Party” in 2017, Richards said. Like many, Richards knew the basic story of the Donner Party, but the well-researched podcast offered more information. It piqued Richards’s interest enough to seek out The Indifferent Stars Above, a book by Daniel James Brown about the Donner Party that offered another angle on the story.

Rather than focusing on the traditional narrative, which makes the story of the Donner Party one about human folly and overreach, Brown’s book ​“centers on this one family, the Graves family,” Richards said. Sarah and Jay Graves were married the day before they, Sarah’s parents, and eight siblings left on their wagon train west. Sarah’s story became a harrowing tale of survival. Brown ​“told that story in such a moving way,” illustrating how ​“truly scary the circumstance were,” Richards said. He brought the story to life, and put images in Richards’s head.

“I thought, ​‘this would be cool as a weird movement circus,’” Richards said. ​“My background is in theater and movement theater…. That’s how I think of things creatively. I see movement or dance.” She was ​“particularly inspired by images of this couple in love, and this image of them on a prairie — and then how tragically it ended. They were mirrored bookends.”

The story of the Donner Party has received dramatic treatment in the past, including three different musicals in 2006, 2014, and 2017. Richards knew that dramatically staging the story would be tricky. Parts of the story, if shown as they happened, would be essentially unwatchable. Too light a touch, however, and a production could become too campy.

Richards began with the idea of ​“an aerial silks piece, and the whole idea grew from there into a circus” — though not in the sense that anything is played for laughs. ​“The cannibalism element is way toned down. It would be gruesome and inelegant to put it on stage,” Richards said. More fundamentally, ​“that’s not the story I wanted to tell.” In his book, Brown ​“really painted a clear picture of the early parts of their journey across the Great Plains.” The members of the party, 87 in total, ​“all came together and told stories and played music at the end of the day. Jay was a fiddler, and he would play these popular tunes and hang out.” They celebrated Independence Day with a party at which ​“everybody brought out whiskey and got soused.” Before tragedy struck, the Donner Party was a moving community, and ​“I really wanted to represent that,” Richards said.

Creating a circus ​“pumps up the joyful elements of the story,” she said, and could help portray ​“how bad and isolated it was” without becoming too literal. It struck Richards as ​“a good medium to strike that balance.”

“It was an idea I didn’t think would come to fruition for a long time, but I met the right people at the right time,” she added.

“I started training at Air Temple Arts in 2019,” Richards said. The pandemic stopped some of Air Temple Art’s activities — though the company put on an outdoor production last fall. (Pre-pandemic, it staged productions in the theater at Educational Center for the Arts on Audubon Street.) Richards had a shoulder injury and wasn’t able to train, but was vocalist for the live music that accompanied that production.

“That was how I came to know Dani Bobbi Lee,” Air Temple Arts’s co-owner and executive director, Richards said. She ran her Donner Party idea by Lee. Lee said ​“oh, we have to do it,” Richards recalled. ​“Everyone was totally jazzed on the concept, just from the mere idea.”

Richards was grateful for Air Temple Arts’s artistic team, which includes artistic director Stacey Strange and technical director Nicholas Strange. ​“I have a really limited circus knowledge and vocabulary,” Richards said. ​“I really relied on them to flesh it out” — which they did, with box juggling, tumbling, hoop diving, and fire routines, in addition to aerials. ​“They really helped bring all of that and make it a circus.”

She also enlisted New Haven-area composer Brian Robinson to write an original score for the piece; she knew him from the New Haven music scene and had appeared in one of Robinson’s music videos for his baroque pop project, Brian Ember. ​“I knew that he composed for string quartet, and I knew I was interested in having fiddle elements and potentially an original score. I asked him if he was interested and he was. We talked about the main beats and the themes, and we just went from there. It was really easy.”

Rehearsals for Heaven or California began in January 2021. ​“They had just started rolling out vaccines. I was remaining really skeptical. I was ready for us to do it with masks on,” Richards said. She also designed the show to be an outdoor production to comply with pandemic safety standards. ​“Outside was definitely born out of that necessity,” she said. ​“Thankfully we now have the flexibility to adapt in case of weather.”

Working on the show also allowed Richards to get to the story behind the popular conception of the Donner Party as a story about hubris. ​“Now that I really understand the story and the history, it’s really not that. Part of it is that they made a bunch of mistakes. But they were also specifically led astray,” Richards said, by a man named Lansford Hastings, who dreamed of creating a new republic in California, invested in it, and advertised the disastrous route the Donner Party took in a book called The Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California.

Knowing that the members of the Donner Party were following Hastings makes them more victims ​“of this guy’s greed,” as Hastings hoped to flood the territory with settlers quickly. That makes the story one of betrayal and tragedy — all at the hands of ​“a capitalist,” Richards said.

The piece’s title is likewise pulled from Richards’s understanding of the details of the story of the Donner Party. When the settlers got stuck in the mountains, Sarah Graves was part of a group of people who left the party to complete the route and tell those on the other side of the mountains that the rest of the party needed rescuing.

“When the first relief party came, there was 18 feet of snow on the ground,” Richards said. The survivors of the Donner Party were buried in cabins beneath it. The rescuers first only saw dead bodies everywhere. Then, Richards said, ​“a woman came up from one of the cabins buried in the snow and said, ​‘do you come from California or do you come from heaven?’”

Heaven or California will be presented on July 10 at Air Temple Arts, 11 Research Dr., Woodbridge. Visit Air Temple’s website for details, tickets, and more information.