Lizzie Borden Live Director’s Notes

by Jack McCullough

First published in November/December, 2007, Volume 4, Issue 4, The Hatchet: Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies.

Directing Lizzie Borden—what an amazing experience! I first heard of the project back in early January of 2006. Jill Dalton told me that she was asked to write a play about Lizzie Borden for Gayle Stahlhuth at East Lynne Theater Company. Gayle had been looking for an interested party for several years. I said to Jill, “Well, I was born in Fall River and my great aunt answered an ad in the Providence Journal for a housekeeper in Fall River around 1910. Low and behold, it was at Maplecroft! Family legend says the great aunt saw Lizzie at the front door and ran for the streetcar.” 

I told her she should take a serious look at this, and that Lizzie was a fascinating woman. Jill said “I’ll see, but if I do it, will you direct it?” Within a month or so we were off and running. A first draft appeared in August of 2006, when Lizzie began to speak to us in so many ways. Since I lived not too far from Fall River we planned to go there and do some research. Jill met me and we went to Maplecroft, Oak Grove Cemetery, and finally, early this year, to 92 Second Street. 

 Jill and I have a six-year friendship and work history. I directed and helped develop her one-woman show My Life in the Trenches. It was during this process that we realized we had a similar vocabulary from our theatre training and experience. We started to look at our choices from a totally organic foundation of building blocks, peeling the veneer off of some of the deeper, raw emotions, trusting each other in a way that led us to a life long friendship.

Along came Lizzie Borden Live. We applied this tried and true process to Lizzie and the material blossomed. The research and writing went on for months. Changes to the script were both exciting and terrifying. My approach was to employ bold choices. Trust and compromise are the only ways to the marrow of any story. Hopefully, our quest to bring Lizzie to life would succeed.

As a director, I felt that we needed to have a special plan to give us and our audience a chance to grow with the piece. As a result, on May 12, 2007, we did the first public reading of Lizzie Borden Live in NYC at the 78th Street Theatre Lab, then a second performance on June 9. There were two additional productions on July 21 and 22 that were more full scale before we moved to Cape May. After each workshop we had a dialogue with the audience to discover places where we weren’t reaching them, where they were not understanding a particular section of the play, or what they thought seemed necessary to tell the story. It also gave Jill (as the actress) the opportunity to perform the play and start to live the story and absorb Lizzie, and that she did.

I am a very process oriented director and a very visual person, but we do have to surrender to product at some point, even if only temporarily, while we go into performance. But I hope, as we grow into the next incarnation, we will make the necessary adjustments to see the communication between performer and audience grow even stronger. 

One of the greatest gifts I have received during this journey with Ms. Lizbeth A. Borden of Maplecroft on the Hill, is a sense that we have given her a chance to tell her story. In a sense, our show lays aside innuendo and gossip and searches for the true arc of a person that suffered a huge catastrophe (being accused of double murder) and survived comfortably to sneer in the face of her disloyal friends and patriarchal accusers. I think of Lizzie as my friend and if this tragedy happened today, or even as it did in 1892, I would stand proudly by her side.

I must also honor Gaye Stahlhuth and East Lynne Theater Co. Gleefully, she was able to attract three-time Tony Nominated orchestrator Larry Hochman to the project. He composed and recorded live original period music that became the soul of the piece. A special thanks goes to 78th Street Theatre Lab, our petri dish for progress; my partner John Boomer for amazing support and love; the gift of working with an amazing actress like Jill Dalton, a director’s dream; our crew, the Presbyterian Church of Cape May; and all of you that were here to see our show.