An Island of Women, an original musical, looks at life on the Vineyard between 1850 and 1852 when much of the male population was off whaling. It was created by Island historian and director E. St. John "Liz" Villard with musical score by Phil Dietterich.
The musical follows the lives of three Vineyard families. Though a work offiction, the story uses the names of real people to examine elements of Island life. The Norton, Cooke, Vincent, Mayhew, Osborne, Cleveland and Vincent families and one "wash-a-shore" are featured in the various vignettes in the show. Mistress Norton is managing her husband’s farm which houses not only her two younger children, but her married daughter and daughter-in-law. Widow Mayhew owns an Edgartown general store which supports her and her three daughters. Mistress Osborne controls her
successful whaling husband’s business interest and tries to live with his continuing absence.
The multigenerational cast of Island actor-singers includes Barbara Fehl, Katrina Nevin, Katharine Pilcher, Matt Pelikan, Lacy and Belle Dinning, Alison Taylor, Abigail Southard, Kathleen Antonsson, Pam Butterick, Martha Hudson, Dan Larkosh and Brad Austin. Jan Hyer, cellist, and Matt Pelikan, violinist will assist Musical Director Dietterich. Brad Austin designed the set and Jeff Enos the lighting.
E. St. John Villard - Playwright and Director
E. St. John "Liz" Villard is known on the Vineyard as the creator of the popular Ghosts, Gossip, and Downright Scandal walking tours which have provided a light hearted introduction to Vineyard history for countless visitors. Although Island is a fictional work, Villard has based many of the characters and what happens to them on real people. While doing research about Island women for an exhibition in the Vincent House Museum, she became fascinated by the way most of the books written about women in the 1850’s concentrated on the few captain’s wives who went to sea on their husband’s ships and ignored the vast majority who remained on the Vineyard.
In order to understand their lives, she worked her way through local documents such as Town vital records, census forms, and court documents. She also spread her net out to include general women history books, discovering the role of women in the spinning and cloth industry, “outwork,” and how women who did not go to sea still were a vital part of the whaling industry. In fact, she comments that Island may be the first play ever inspired by the 1850 census.
Given her love of history and her theatrical experience, it was logical for her to write a play so she could turn all of her dry research into living events.
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Villard taught at the college level for over twenty years and has directed over 100 plays ranging from Greek tragedy to modern playwright including Strindberg, Chekhov, Albee, and Stoppard as well as works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. This will be her third year as the resident light designer at the Yard. She graduated summa cum laude in drama from Vassar College. She has a MFA in theater history and an Mphil in dramatic literature from Columbia University.
Phil Dietterich - Musical Director and Score
Villard turned to Dietterich to create songs that dramatize the joys and sorrows of these women. Dietterich enjoyed working with the emotional range required as the drama unfolds. A family's apprehension is turned into a bon voyage chantey, "The sea chest, what do we put in the sea chest?" The young woman betrothed to a sailor expresses her impatience and frustration singing "It's dead on the Vineyard" as she decides to leave the island and go to work in a Fall River mill. "We are building fancy homes" is sung by a young architect-builder, Peter Bradford, who was brought from Plymouth by his female employer, Elizabeth Osborne, the wife of a very successful and wealthy whaling captain. They are beginning to build the large, handsome homes of Edgartown.
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The musical includes a love song, a lullaby, homesick songs, hymns at a Methodist hymn-sing, and emotional death-grief lament, a rebellious song from a young woman who wants to marry a builder rather than a whaler. Dietterich has composed audience-friendly songs in a mid-nineteenth century style. He adds, "The music should drive home the point and emotion of each scene with expressive song."
A versatile musician, Mr. Dietterich is a composer, conductor, organist, pianist and Shaker music enthusiast. For thirty-three years he served as Minister of Music at First United Methodist Church , Westfield, New Jersey , where he directed choirs of children, youth, and adults, an international touring choir, and a Shaker song and danceensemble. He founded The Oratorio Singers there--a 100-voice community choir that performed large religious master works with professional soloists and orchestras. He has served on the music faculty of Union Theological Seminary's School of Sacred Music in New York City . Ohio Wesleyan University and Boston University School of Theology have honored him with their "distinguished alumnus" awards.
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