Buskers, poverty, inequality and mountain music by a local musician all figure into “Hearth: A Yuletide Tale,” a new Montana Repertory Theatre production that they hope to build into an annual tradition.
The original play, revolving around street musicians and vagabonds during a cold winter, is written by Tyson Gerhardt. The Missoula songwriter’s recent band, Recession Special, started up during the pandemic.
They “formed as a band of buskers, which is what this play wound up being about, kind of,” Gerhardt said.
Artistic Director Michael Legg said the Rep, a professional company in residence at the University of Montana, has always been committed to local writers. Workshopping and developing an original piece by a local writer into a full main-season production is “a big step in that commitment.”
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Audiences will see the full play, and hear music by a live band, but it will be staged minimally, like “a reading and a concert, mixed all together,” Legg said.
Gerhardt and a version of his band will perform, but he wouldn’t call it a musical. Rather it's a play with music “woven into the tapestry of the story.”
If you've seen his solo act, Dusty the Kid, the compositions for the show will seem of a piece: mountain tunes, old-time music, drinking songs, and “all those things that we love,” he said. His musical compass includes punk and folk traditions, and so class and wealth disparity “loom pretty large in the thematic catalog” and happen to be more timely than ever as the state experiences a housing crisis.
“I feel like especially in our community in Missoula and across Montana as a whole, we’re at a pivotal point when it comes to income disparity and housing inequality,” he said. “And what better time to bring that up than Christmas?”
The setting is Missoula in the 1960s. Tom, a young guy from a modest middle American background, is “exposed to the world of people who are living on the street in wintertime,” Gerhardt said. He befriends an older woman, Mary, who lives on the street, and then meets more homeless people, street musicians and buskers.
From there, he comes up with a plan to try to help, and the plot explores questions of “what can be done, what should be done, what is overstepping the sovereignty of others, what exacerbates the situation,” he said.
While he’s upfront that his play offers no answers, he thinks it’s “something that people need to understand in a far more nuanced fashion.”
Legg said that it is, in the end, “optimistic” and he’s comfortable calling it a holiday show.
Story's origins
The stories of people busking and leaving lean come from a place close to Gerhardt.
The Livingston native studied theater at the University of Montana and graduated in 2017. He’s been a musician since before he was in theater, working in a few genres that overlap in their concerns — punk and hardcore, folk and old-time music.
In the years before the pandemic, he was traveling full-time and playing music, but he’d decided to settle down here and had lined up acting gigs before the pandemic wiped out live entertainment in 2020.
Out of work that summer, he busked downtown with Geoffrey Taylor, a fiddler/violinist, for money. He started working at Butterfly Herbs after it reopened, and met Finn Carroll, a jazz bassist who studied at the New School in New York.
Meanwhile, he was living out of his truck, parked in a friend’s driveway. That friend is a recording engineer and percussionist, and “we kind of accidentally started a band,” he said.
Developing a new play
Legg had worked with Gerhardt before as an actor on the Rep’s audio play series earlier this year, “Plays on Call,” and was excited about his band, and approached him with the idea of working together on a show.
“Musicians are natural storytellers. It’s a big leap between writing a song and writing a play, but I think that people who are good songwriters make good playwrights as a rule,” he said.
The Rep had been looking at ways to “shape a season that speaks to Missoula,” he said, and as part of that he’d been thinking about how to create a Missoula holiday tradition that could join longstanding ones like the “Rocky Horror Show Live!” on Halloween and the Garden City Ballet’s “Nutcracker,” an evergreen annual production that’s somewhat different every year.
After a drafting process, a 10-page script reached 60 pages and table readings with actors and musicians were held.
“We try to do everything we can to help Tyson find the best version of the play,” Legg said.
Workshopping in public
The final ingredient is the audience, which will see the play in its earliest form. “Part of the new play development process is to bring the public in to see the work as it is,” said Legg, who worked extensively on original works in his previous job at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and has continued to do so here.
They brought on a local playwright, Kate Morris, as their dramaturge — something like a book editor in the theater world, who ensures that the story has clarity and continuity. After each performance, there will be a talk-back with the audience, in which they ask which parts worked or didn’t, and then Gerhardt can work those opinions into rewrites or new scenes.
It’s a standard part of developing a new play, Legg said, but it’s not often done this publicly.
“I want Missoula to feel a part of the creation and growth and development of this play. I want them to become invested in this story and how it grows and changes, and the idea is that when they all come back next year, that's when they're gonna see the full-out production of the show, and maybe every year after,” he said.
Broadening the audience
The Rep is continuing its “pick what you pay model,” in which audience members can choose their own price of admission. The structure is designed to make theater more accessible for those who can’t pay for a typical theater ticket, and others can pay more to support the company. (It’s also sponsored by NorthWestern Energy.)
The first show under the model, “Back to School,” a series of short original plays set in different areas of Willard School, sold out six of the eight performances, Legg said. Of those attendees, more than half had never been to a Rep show before.
“Yuletide” has two weekend runs in two separate locations. The first is at the Rep’s home stage in the Montana Theatre. The second is at the Show Room performance space in the Zootown Arts Community Center.
Legg said it’s intended to broaden the potential reach — “the traditional Rep audience” and “folks who follow Tyson and his music but have never been to see a play.”
“I’m trying to attract as wide an audience in Missoula as I possibly can,” he said.