By Jim Lowe
Staff Writer
In “Going up the Country,” Vermont author and journalist Yvonne Daley chronicles how the 1960s counterculture — popularly known as “the hippie invasion” — changed Vermont, and how Vermont changed those who came here to build a new “clean” life. Playwright Eric Peterson and composer John Foley have created a play with music that relives that pivotal time.
“I think it’s a well-written interesting book about Vermont history, but also about American history,” Peterson said recently by Zoom. “It’s extremely entertaining, it’s got some fantastic characters — Bernie Sanders, Ben and Jerry, David Budbill, Jay Craven, the women who created the Jogbra, a lot of artists, a lot of politicians, and a lot of just kind of regular folks.”
“My distant memory of people playing music in those days, the hippie explosion and FM radio just coming out, music was just saturating all of our lives back in the ’60s,” added Foley, one of the creators of Broadway’s “Pump Boys & Dinettes” who was living in North Carolina at the time. “Everybody ran out and bought a $100 guitar, learned three chords, and said, ‘I’m a musician.’ So I wanted to honor that.”
Lost Nation Theater will present “Going Up the Country,” a reading of the latest version of the script, streamed online at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 19 live from Montpelier City Hall Arts Center. A talkback with the creators and actors will follow.
“It’s pretty special stuff,” Peterson said. “Our hope is that it gets to a point where Lost Nation can do a full production. I would love to see it taped and shown on Vermont Public Television.”
“Going Up the Country” — the title taken from a song of the time by Canned Heat — begins when the hippies, dreamers, freaks and radicals moved to Vermont. Kim Allen Bent, Lost Nation Theater’s founding artistic director, will lead a cast of four in the reading with music performed by Foley. Many changes have been made based on audience and actor feedback since Lost Nation’s initial public reading in November 2020.
“One of the things that really interested me about it was not just how the hippies changed Vermont, and the hippies were changed by Vermont, but how it’s been a continuing change because of them,” Peterson said. “Health care in Vermont is different because of the hippie invasion; certainly politics is different because of the hippie invasion.
“And so it’s had this long-lasting effect of 50 years now,” Peterson said. “It was a very interesting time in the United States, and the Vermont story was sort of a microcosm of what was happening everywhere.”
Peterson was the founder and artistic director of Bennington’s venerable professional Oldcastle Theatre, which he left in 2020. As a playwright, the Bennington native has specialized in plays set in Vermont. Just finished, “Out of the Dark” is loosely based on the late 1930s when Arlington finally got electricity. At Oldcastle, he also premiered “Bennington Goes to War,” a local World War II story.
Lost Nation Theater has likely produced more Vermont-based plays than any other professional theater in the state, including “Judevine” and other Vermont plays by the late David Budbill. The company has also premiered Vermont-based works by Richard W. Robson (“Ransom”), A.M. Dolan (“Robert Frost: This Verse Business”), Stephen Spoonamore (“Deane Davis Remembered”), among others, and Bent’s own “Stone,” celebrating Barre’s granite industry.
“Initially we worked on the obvious characters, the historical ones we’ve already mentioned,” Peterson said. “We decided early on, because John is a wonderful musician and writer, to bring some music to it. You can’t really talk about the period, the hippie era of the ’60s and ’70s, without talking a lot about the music.”
Peterson found that there were parts of the story that he wished to tell that weren’t actually in the book. And so he created a series of composite characters, two in particular who are now throughout the play.
Steve and Melanie came with hippie wave, and quickly embraced Vermont rural culture. As time went on, Steve yearned for the trappings of the urban world, and returns to it despite their newborn child.
“Their story mirrors a lot of the people who came to Vermont, kind of on a whim, in the summer, and really enjoyed it, one in the couple more than the other,” Peterson said. “It starts to get cold and they wonder, ‘Wait a minute! How are we going to stay here? What are we going to do?’ They have a child, etc., etc.
“So we get to show what some of the people who didn’t become famous wound up doing in Vermont,” Peterson said. “It’s a way to tell as many of these stories as possible.”
The format of the play was new to Foley, although Peterson had used it before.
“The fourth wall (between the actors and the audience) goes down; the fourth wall comes back up,” Foley said. “It’s kind of a stew of theatrical presentations. So that interested me. And then we were able, with the characters Eric mentioned, to have scenes that brought out the feelings of the people in the middle of the hippie invasion.
“And we could have scenes where we’d have their feelings about what’s happening to everybody as well as having ‘talking heads’ explaining lots of information,” Foley said.
For Peterson, it comes down to the joy of storytelling.
“When you look at the audience and say, ‘We have a great story to tell you. Listen to this!’” he said. “We also made Yvonne a character. She’s got a couple scenes. We were worried she wouldn’t like it, and she was a little hesitant at first, but she seems to like it now.”
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