This weekend in Providence, at the Columbus Theatre, November 15 and 16, will appear a unique play about Lizzie Borden. I have not seen the show yet. But I will this weekend. I highly suggest you go too!
Play offers a different look at Lizzie Borden
Thursday, November 13, 2008
By Channing Gray
Most people think of Fall River’s Lizzie Borden as the woman who hacked her parents to death with an ax, one of the most notorious figures in the annals of crime. But there is more to the story than that, and Jill Dalton would like to tell you about it.
Dalton, an award-winning New York actor with a long list of television and theater credits, has put together a one-woman show about the life of Borden, who was acquitted for the murders of her father and stepmother more than a century ago. Dalton wrote the 80-minute script and will be starring in the production tomorrow night and Saturday at the Columbus Theatre on Broadway.
“All I knew was that she was an ax murderer,” said Dalton, who spent about nine months researching the show.
“I told the woman who asked me to write it that I didn’t know if I wanted a homicidal ax murder living inside my head. But then I started reading certain things and didn’t get any negative energy.
“The real arc of her life is much more interesting than all the gossip they write about.”
The show, which just played Arizona, takes place 13 years after the murders. It opens with Lizzie feeding her beloved birds in the backyard of Maplecroft, the hilltop mansion in Fall River that she bought after the murders and where she lived for more than three decades.
She has just had a falling out with her older sister, Emma, over opening the house to theater types. The two never spoke again.
Now memories begin to flood in and we are taken back to the murders, the trial and Lizzie’s early life.
At this point, Dalton becomes Lizzie’s parents, the police and other important figures in her life, as she recites lines from the transcript of the trial.
“It’s really Lizzie telling her side of the story,” said director Jack McCullough, who lives in East Providence and helped Dalton develop the show.
The split between the two sisters was a momentous event in Lizzie’s life, more important than the murders, said Dalton. At that point Lizzie, who is something of an outcast taunted by children, is abandoned by everyone save her friend Nance O’Neil, the famed Shakespearean actress who is purported to have been Lizzie’s lesbian lover.
The show has its grisly moments, as a hatchet-wielding Dalton enacts the murders. But there is also humor in it, said Dalton. Lizzie used to make light of her parents’ death as a way of coping with the tragedy, said Dalton.
“There is a lot of tragedy in this play,” said Dalton, “but a lot of humor, too. I have to let the audience know that they are allowed to laugh. People are sometimes a little apprehensive.”
Theories about the murders, which took place in 1892, abound. Some have said the maid did it out of anger over being asked to wash windows on a sultry August morning. Another possible culprit is the illegitimate son of Lizzie’s father Andrew, who it is speculated to have carried out a revenge killing in his failed attempts to extort money from Andrew, a wealthy bank president.
McCullough said the boy, William Borden, hanged himself three years after the slayings, and that a hatchet was found in his possession.
Yet another theory is that Lizzie, whom Dalton called the “OJ of her time,” suffered an epileptic seizure during her menstrual cycle and killed her parents in a dream-like state.
But Dalton, who read the entire 1,700-page trial transcript, pretty much lets the audience come to their own conclusions.
She and McCullough found in their researchthat Lizzie suffered from kleptomania, a condition that can be brought about by sexual abuse. Could it be that her father had abused her and the murders were somehow in response to that?
“I don’t say whether she was molested or whether she had an affair with Nance O’Neil,” said Dalton. “I present things and let the audience figure it out.”
McCullough thinks it might have been Lizzie’s uncle, John Morse, who committed the slayings. He was visiting the Borden home at the time and had been known to argue with Andrew, his brother-in-law, over property that Andrew owned.
Dalton, on the other hand, is not so sure.
“Some nights I do the show and say, ‘I’m so innocent. How could this happen to me?’ Other nights I say, ‘I’m so guilty. I really did this.’ ”
Those who have seen the show more than once, said Dalton, often have conflicting opinions about Lizzie’s guilt, too.
But McCullough, a Trinity Rep conservatory graduate, doesn’t think Lizzie capable of delivering such a series of precise hatchet blows. Andrew Borden was killed by 11 strikes to the face, and his wife, by 19 blows to the back of the head, all in a compact area.
McCullough thinks that had Lizzie wielded the murder weapon the wounds might have been more haphazard and scattered about the body.
Her uncle, after all, was a butcher, said McCullough.
Dalton and McCullough met in 2000 while playing detectives on the Law & Order: Criminal Intent television series. He worked with her on another solo show about growing up as an Army brat.
In 2005 Dalton was asked to write the show about Borden. She said she spent nine months researching it, visiting Fall River and the places where Lizzie lived.
But she hated her first draft because it was “too linear.” So she holed up for a few days by herself and re-thought the script.
“I asked for guidance,” said Dalton, “and at the end of the third day, it was like something went off. I just moved stuff and edited it and it began to flow.
“But the audience really has to pay attention, there’s so much stuff going on.”
The show ran for five weeks at a theater in Cape May, N.J., and it has played New York. This weekend’s performance, the New England premiere, will be accompanied by a CD of original music by the Tony-nominated composer Larry Hochman, who was the orchestrator for Spamalot.
If nothing else, said McCullough, the show puts a human face on Lizzie.
“We never see her as a human being,” said McCullough.
“And what we’ve done here is given her a human side, a side most people have never seen.”
Performances of Lizzie Borden Live with Jill Dalton take place tomorrow night and Saturday night at 8 at the Columbus Theatre, 270 Broadway, Providence. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased on line at www.lizziebordenlive.com or at the door.
