In "Lost Girl," FUSE Marks A Return To The Stage

Riley Arenberg, Abigail Paige and Andrew James Bleidner at rehearsal for Lost Girl. The show runs July 22 and 23 at Gateway Christian Fellowship, 129 Bull Hill Ln. in West Haven. Lucy Gellman Photos.  

Wendy Darling stood at the lip of the stage, her eyes wide above a crinkly black mask. To her left, a therapist scribbled down notes on a clipboard, rotating through a list of questions that sounded familiar. How long had it been since her return from Neverland? How often did she think about Peter Pan? What made her happy?  The mask caught the light as she turned her face toward the audience and began to speak. 

“Why does everyone have to be happy?” she asked. “When did that become the goal?”

Wendy Darling (Abigail Paige) is the core of Kimberly Belflower’s Lost Girl, opening this week from Fuse Theatre of CT in West Haven. The show, told from Darling’s perspective, begins eight years after her journey to Neverland and provides the pendant to the 1911 book that Peter Pan audiences didn't know they needed. It marks the first time that Fuse—which was slated to open its first show in March 2020—has ever been able to gather for a full in-person production.

Performances run Friday July 22 at 7 p.m. and Saturday July 23 at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. at Gateway Christian Fellowship on 129 Bull Hill Ln. in West Haven. ArtsWest CT plans to hold an arts and business networking session in between Saturday shows. Tickets and more information are available here.

FUSE Co-Founder Laura Morton: "There’s a lot more joy. I mean, there’s always joy. But now it’s like joy with a capital J.”

“I think a lot of us identify with having something in our past that we are haunted by,” said director and Fuse Co-Founder Laura Morton last Sunday, during a mid-rehearsal meal break. “No one escapes childhood without some kind of trauma. I think this show is really about how to move on from that and how to grow up.”

First published in 2016—when Belflower was still a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin—Lost Girl turns the Peter Pan mythology on its head, making Wendy’s voice (rather than that of Peter, played by a nimble Andrew James Bleidner) the most urgent one in the room. When the audience meets Wendy, she is the girl who has grown up—sort of—still caught in her memories of that wild and strange faraway place that is Neverland. In particular, she cannot let go of Peter, that perennially young boy at the fairytale’s core.

To J.M. Barrie’s turn-of-the-century text, it is neither a window nor a door but a Frankenstiney operating table, where the grotesque and the poetic live side by side. Actors reopen Barrie’s text and take its guts out, holding them to the light to figure out where things went wrong and what’s not working anymore.

Justin Wargo and Abigail Paige in Kimberly Belflower's Lost Girl. The show runs July 22 and 23 at Gateway Christian Fellowship, 129 Bull Hill Ln. in West Haven. Lucy Gellman Photos.  

As her mother (Riley Arenberg) both moves forward and brings out a parade of doctors and therapists (Demarie Lopez and Dyllan Siegmund), Wendy deftly shows the audience how a memory that won’t let go—call it trauma, or call it sadness, or call it something else entirely—can catch and loop in one’s mind like a glitchy record. The script is suffused with a deeply poetic, psychological exploration of personal trauma and reclamation, very much in keeping with  works by Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson and Rebecca Solnit that Belflower has written about reading closely at the time.

As it comes to the stage at Gateway Christian Fellowship, the creative team has folded in propulsive, swift and often very physical choreography (a nod to Susan Dresser) and original music (Lydia Arachne). Morton praised Arachne, the exquisite, funky brain behind the group Semaphora, for a score that weaves magic right into the show as it plays beneath actors. Two years ago, Arachne also worked with the company on a A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Rewired Musical, a remote, pandemic-proofed take on Shakespeare for which she wrote the original score.

While it was written well before the pandemic, Lost Girl feels very much like a play for exactly the times in which its young actors—mostly high school students and recent graduates—find themselves. In part, Morton said, that’s because it was important to her to “tell women’s stories,” which are never not undertold, and never not trenchant.

Wendy hasn’t lived through a pandemic, but she has come back from a kidnapping to an alternate universe, and that seems close enough. The moment in which actors and the audience are living, defined by a loss of one’s own bodily autonomy for half the country, also comes across as chillingly relevant.

Serena McFarland, Abigail Paige, Emma Bender and Gwen Gersick in Kimberly Belflower's Lost Girl. The show runs July 22 and 23 at Gateway Christian Fellowship, 129 Bull Hill Ln. in West Haven. Lucy Gellman Photos.  

Indeed, the audience gets the sense that in Wendy’s Neverland, the fantasy may have been very real, but the patriarchy and the trauma were too (all that romantic entanglement and “mother” role playing? No thank you, Mr. Barrie). As Wendy explores her own psychic trauma in speech and in movement, audience members may turn to and address their own personal Neverlands, and the people or things still lurking inside of them.

Paige, a rising high school senior who commutes each week from Rhode Island for rehearsal, said that she’s taken on the script as both a challenge and a teaching text, from which she can draw life lessons. One, she said, is how deeply the script relates to mental health struggles that young people might be having in the present.

“Wendy’s going through so much,” she said. “You can see when she’s working through it.”

She added that she’s relieved to be back in person, and acutely aware of how the pandemic has changed her own acting practice in ways that she never expected. Because the cast is masked for rehearsals, she finds that she’s much more expressive with the upper half of her face, and especially her eyes. So are her cast mates, with whom she said she’s thrilled to share a stage.

In one sequence, Paige does a trust fall forward as she is speaking, as if to mimic flying. Kimberly Belflower's Lost Girl runs July 22 and 23 at Gateway Christian Fellowship, 129 Bull Hill Ln. in West Haven. Lucy Gellman Photos.  

So too for Arenberg, a rising junior at Hamden High School who first read Peter Pan at four, wrote a sequel to the book at seven (yes, she said, she still has a copy at home), and has returned to the text for years. What kept calling her back was its tone.

“It’s not an average fairy tale. It’s not a happy ending,” she said. So when she saw that Lost Girl was Fuse’s summer selection, she jumped at the chance to be in the show. The mother character suits her, she said—she’s often the nurturer and the conflict moderator among her friends.

“Theater for me, a lot of it is about being able to develop empathy and embody another person,” she said. When she hears adults talking about mental health, “I think the knowledge is very textbook. Art is an opening to talk about that [in a different way].”

Sitting on the stage beside her, Bleidner nodded thoughtfully, his eyes growing wide above a mouthwash-blue medical mask. In the show, he plays both Peter Pan and the character Slightly.

“We take something that would be uncomfortable to talk about and we create communication [around it],” Bleidner said. “We build each other up. I feel very blessed to be here.”

“Use Your Instincts!”

FUSE Co-Founder Laura Morton, Assistant and Technical Director Keona Marie Gomes, and Co-Producer Noah Golden. Kimberly Belflower's Lost Girl runs July 22 and 23 at Gateway Christian Fellowship, 129 Bull Hill Ln. in West Haven. Lucy Gellman Photos.  

It is also a play that, at its wildly beating heart, tells a story of the community theater company that could—and in the face of a global pandemic, that did. Two years into an ongoing pandemic, Lost Girl is not just a return to the stage, but a story of continuous adaptation in a changing arts landscape.

In 2019, Morton co-founded Fuse with Susan Larkin, part of a lifelong dream to run a theater company that's been blooming since she saw Into The Woods on Broadway at 17 years old. In 2020, Morton was deep into Fuse rehearsals for The Lion King Jr. when news of a severe respiratory virus began coming over the airwaves. The show—the company’s first—was scheduled for March 20, 2020.

The company powered through rehearsals until it was no longer safe to do so. Theaters shut their doors. Morton remembered feeling like the floor had opened up beneath her. 

But Fuse never quit. “We rallied and we pivoted,” Morton said. When it became clear that the pandemic would be more than a few weeks, Fuse started laying the groundwork for A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The Rewired Musical, a virtual and mellifluous tour through Shakespeare’s 1605 text. After months of composing, taping, editing, and getting creative with green screens, the company released the musical in summer 2020.

It's now using it as a teaching tool for schools across the region. Last year, Fuse went on to hold All Together Now, a one-night-only concert performance and celebration of musical theater. Gateway, which had been their home for that performance, offered its space a second time this year.

“It feels like such a privilege to be back in person,” Morton said, adding that she’s now aware of how precious each rehearsal is. “There’s a lot more joy. I mean, there’s always joy. But now it’s like joy with a capital J.”

As cast members masked up and rehearsed last Sunday, Morton’s excitement to be back in person with a cast and crew was palpable. In the first row, she and assistant director Keona Marie Gomes watched each move, careful to call for a repeat if something didn’t hit exactly the way they’d imagined it would. Gomes, who is studying criminal justice at the University of Hartford and caught the theater bug out as one of Morton’s students at Davis Street School. For her, it marked a full circle moment.

At one point, the two studied a configuration of three actors at center stage, Morton’s eyes furrowing and unfurrowing as actors began to speak. Something was off. She reminded them that they had the entire stage to work with—and that they should trust their own instincts more. On stage, Gwen Gersick, Serena McFarland and Emma Blanchette snapped back into action.

“You all blocked the show, more or less, using your instincts,” she said. “Use your instincts! Claim your spaces!”    

Gwen Gersick, Serena McFarland and Emma Blanchette. Kimberly Belflower's Lost Girl runs July 22 and 23 at Gateway Christian Fellowship, 129 Bull Hill Ln. in West Haven. Lucy Gellman Photos.  

At center stage, the three tried again. This time, they stepped forward, then propelled themselves onto sturdy black crates at the front of the stage. The move worked: they suddenly felt close, intimate. They began to speak quickly, one sentence falling right after the other.

“Did you hear?” a voice rang out. “Do you remember?” another came in underneath it.

“That girl!” a third chimed. “How old is she now?” a forth. “Old enough,” the third answered.

The sentences kept coming, narrators dizzyingly indistinguishable. “She grew up.” “She’s growing up.” “They say she never leaves the house.” “Still!” “They say she cries all the time.” “Still!” “They say she never sleeps!” “Still!”

In the front row, Morton nodded at what she was hearing. Then she pressed on to the next scene. 

Like Fuse’s online endeavors, Morton has also made sure that the company is a place for young people to hone their skills as the actors, directors, producers and technicians of the field’s future. Gomes, for instance, started with Morton at Davis Street, and is now building her theater expertise between college semesters.

After jumping into the field with Morton, she went on to study theater at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, from which she graduated in 2021. This is her first time as assistant and technical director on a show.

“It feels good. I’m really excited for the show,” she said. She’s not bothered by the technical limitations of the setting, she added, but sees it as a challenge. “I think that a really valuable skill for everyone is to have adaptability and resilience.”

Morton added that she is also excited for the show because it’s part of West Haven’s growing cultural footprint. In the last several years, Morton has watched West Haven’s art scene come into its own—a germination that she credits partly to ArtsWest CT President and cultural champion Elinor Slomba.

In advance of Lost Girl, Morton has reached out to local businesses to see how they can help the company, and vice versa. Slomba will also be leading an arts and business meetup Saturday afternoon at Gateway Christian Fellowship, to encourage attendance at one of the performances. 

"We’re looking to really grow our roots in West Haven,” Morton said. “There’s so much untapped potential here. There are so many artists living in West Haven.”

Performances of Kimberly Belflower’s Lost Girl run Friday July 22 at 7 p.m. and Saturday July 23 at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. at Gateway Christian Fellowship, 129 Bull Hill Ln. in West Haven. ArtsWest CT will have a discussion at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday between shows. RSVP in advance by emailing artswestct@gmail.com. Tickets and more information are available here.