Thomas MacMillan Photo
One of the hottest tickets in town brings New Haveners back 150 years to the era of the corset and a liberating invention called the bicycle — a trip that begins not onstage, but in a pre-performance journey down a steel-cage elevator through a 19th century tunnel.
The journey ends — and the play begins — on this makeshift stage, where A Broken Umbrella, New Haven’s own site-specific local-history-reviving theater company, is staging a new play called Freewheelers as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
The play (which runs through June 29) transports the viewer to another time and place. So does the pre-performance journey to the stage, a forgotten warehouse space that was part of the old Horowitz Bros. store on Chapel Street. Along the route viewers begin to turn back the pages of the calendar, to a time in New Haven’s history when two inventions collided to create a change in society’s notions of womanhood.
A Broken Umbrella has created a name for itself by transforming unexpected pockets of New Haven into unconventional theater spaces, and Freewheelers is no different.
The play tells the story of the corset and the bicycle, two products that played a large role in New Haven’s past. In 1862, the Strouse, Adler garment factory began making women’s corsets, the first such production outside of France, according to A Broken Umbrella’s Ryan Gardner (pictured above). Four years later, Pierre Lallement patented his bicycle, completing his famous ride from Ansonia to New Haven. As women began to ride bicycles, they also began to shed their corsets, a development that was met initially by outrage. Freewheelers tackles that historical moment, when new technology met society’s expectations.
The company had been working on the seed of the play for some time when it was approached by Olympia Properties Chris Nicotra. Nicotra said he had a space it should consider for its next production. The theater company took a look at the warehouse, accessible from the parking lot on State Street just south of Chapel, and began to transform it.
That meant ripping out the suspended ceiling, pulling up the weird tiling on the floor, exposing hardwood floors and herringbone-patterned ceilings. Hundreds of person-hours later, the lofty space now feels like the inside of a time capsule, with picturesquely crumbling walls showing the lath beneath the plaster, and the vaults of old painted-over skylights high over head. The city gave A Broken Umbrella special permission to hold performances in the space, which seats 80 people.
“It’s always really exciting to see a space come to life,” said Gardner. It’s part of A Broken Umbrella’s dual mission, he said. The company not only tells stories from New Haven’s history; it brings people in to unique spaces in the city that they might never otherwise experience.
With Freewheelers, the company decided to heighten the experience of entering the past by making the act of entering the theater into a part of the production.
Audience members enter from Chapel Street, where they board what’s believed to be the state’s oldest elevator and ride it down below ground level. Disembarking, they’re greeted with a corridor lined with art installations of different kinds.
The walls are plastered with period advertisements for corsets and bikes.
More relics of industry lurk in a corner (as pictured at the top of the story) … including old order pads from the Horowitz Bros. store (above).
Rows of salvages sewing machines haunt a side chamber, as though waiting for the next shift of garment workers.
The spokes of big penny-farthing bikes from the Devil’s Gear bike shop glimmer in another alcove.
And a giant shadow box waits at the end of the corridor.
The show features another salvaged prize, this one behind the scenes. The company has converted a big old blue school bus into a mobile dressing room, parked behind the warehouse.
The old school-bus seats have been removed to make way for mirrors and makeup stations where actors transform themselves before entering the transformed warehouse.