Memory - Page - Stage: How Tippy: Stories from the River grew up
When The Impostors Theatre Co. was in its fledgling stages, we talked a lot about the fairy tales and stories that stuck with us as children. A pack of 20-somethings with too many ideas one moment and too few the next, we clustered around a campfire at a cabin in the woods one weekend, telling each other ghost stories. We were having some laughs, but we were also chipping away at our mission, trying to mold the type of theatre we wanted to create.
At some point during that weekend, I shared the story of Tippy. In truth, “story” is a very loose term, but the memory I have of the story’s affect on me is still sharp. Tippy took over my brother’s and my imagination one summer when we were incredibly young and spending long weekends at my aunt's and uncle’s lake house. A small house located on the Tippecanoe River in north central Indiana, “the cottage,” as we called it, featured a raised deck that overlooked the narrow river.
At night, we would sit out on the deck and listen to the sounds coming from the river and trees in between jokes and stories. One of our neighbors frequently drifted by in a small prop boat, hoisting dripping nets from the water, the action illuminated by a beam of light coming from a lamp. He was night fishing, I suppose, but my brother or I mentioned once that the water weeds caught in the nets looked like bloody organs in the lamplight. We were likely trying to get my Uncle Wayne’s attention. He was always telling us tall tales, stories that were usually a little spooky and very clearly untrue, something we realized even at that age. For instance, he told us once that olives were actually eyeballs, and we were as horrified as we were giddy.
Once the organ observation was made, he didn’t disappoint. He latched onto our curiosity tinged with fear and spun a tale about a man named Tippy who drifted up and down the river every night, searching for his wife who was thrown overboard in a terrible storm. His wife was most surely dead, and whenever he pulled up nets of entrails, there was a chance they were hers. Naturally, Wayne heavily implied that the ghost of Tippy’s wife haunted the Tippecanoe River.
After that, Kyle and I were obsessed. We talked about Tippy and his ghostly wife all the time, and we even drew and colored a bunch of somewhat disturbing renderings of her in crayon. On one of the weekends our cousin visited, we had him hooked on Tippy, too. Some of the drawings are still intact today.
Later that summer, Wayne unexpectedly passed away. He had contracted necrotising fasciitis, a flesh-eating virus that took his life in less than two days. No one could determine how or why it happened, but my parents always believed bacteria from the river, in which we all waded days before, infected a cut on his leg. The suddenness and the strangeness of it never left me, and from then on Tippy’s story felt both nostalgic and cold. A part of me wondered if the river really was haunted by a darkness.
Telling this story to my colleagues brought a lot of those emotions back to the surface. Not just the story of Tippy, but the way that story shifted for me throughout the years as I grew older. The way it informed my ideas about living and dying, about how a fairy tale’s meaning changes for you as you grow older, about the impact a story can have on your imagination and life, and how it impacts the lives of those around you.
The Impostors encouraged me to write a play about Tippy. The themes spoke directly to our mission, and there was an opportunity to stage something both meaningful to us and fantastical overall. I finished writing Tippy: Stories from the River almost three years later. While not strictly autobiographical, the play borrowed much more from its origins story than I intended when I started writing. But, as these things go, the play began to write its own life, and the new characters and stories that announced themselves during the process were the most pleasant surprises. I also realized that my memory of Tippy wasn’t faithful: over the years, Tippy had become the woman in the story, while the man in the boat remained nameless to me. It wasn’t until I discovered a drawing my brother and I had captioned, “Tippy’s Wife” that I realized my memory had switched things up somewhere down the line. But it felt right somehow—the woman who haunted the river deserved the namesake.
When it was finally time to place Tippy in the hands of the storytellers bringing her to life on stage, it was more difficult than I anticipated. There’s a certain anxiety that comes with writing something—especially something so personal—and giving it to someone else to dissect. A part of the writer yearns to share, but another wants to keep the writing safely locked away. Plus, the damn thing just never feels finished. You know what I mean?
But surprisingly, I found the most joy in others’ touches on the story. In his vision, Stefan Roseen was able to elevate so many quiet, earnest moments between characters, and then contrast them with colorful, whimsical moments. He had a very specific idea for Tippy’s world, and every one of them paid off. He also, very wisely, nurtured the comedy in the script rather than focusing on the dramatic aspects.
Stefan and I discussed the sound design at length; sound designer Patrick Jansen was able to capture the resonant theme Stefan imagined, as well as those familiar night sounds, and it perfectly scored the story. Ethan Gasbarro crafted a set that included elements from the script—items like oars, toys, beer cans, and more washed up from floods framed the edges of the proscenium, and a crescent moon overlooked a map of the Tippecanoe River winding down the stage floor. It was dreamlike but rooted in substance.
Mallory Swisher’s lighting design lifted Tippy into a space that felt like something between a memory and a dream. She made us feel as if we were actually underwater at times. To see the vibrant colors she selected took the finished product far beyond the earthy tones I imagined in writing, and I was so thrilled by that. Emily Gulbrandsen’s costume design was very special to me—she gave each performer a pop of yellow to wear with their costumes of blues and greens. The yellow, she said, symbolized Kirk’s—the character inspired by my Uncle Wayne—influence on the characters.
The actors’ enthusiasm and compassion for their roles became a force. They each bestowed something new on the characters, something that’s impossible to foresee on the page alone. Once a script is on its feet and all these elements come together, there really is something akin to magic at work.
These thoughtful considerations in telling the story moved me to no end. What a joy it was to see and hear something I had written, and to feel so much life in it. I was incredibly humbled by the experience, and I found a reenergized love for writing, making theatre, and sharing stories.
One of our objectives in The Impostors Theatre Co. is to inspire both the wide-eyed and world-weary, and confront questions and conflicts through engagement and storytelling. We sought to achieve this in Tippy: Stories from the River, and to pay tribute to the solace we find in telling our stories.
