The production that never was: Mark Jordan shares the Appleseed Center idea that never sprouted

MIFFLIN TOWNSHIP — You can’t live for 50 years without having a few stories to tell, particularly when you’ve managed to get into a few interesting adventures along the way, as I have.

(Brief aside: My proudest moment is still the time I caught up my mother with my latest activities, and she shook her head in wonder and said, “You sure do lead an interesting life.”)

But this particular story is one that I’ve sat on for quite a while. I’m prompted to tell it now because of a recent late-night conversation.

I’ve known Zach Tuggle for a long time, he’s a well-known journalist in the region who works for, as we say in the business, a rival publication.

But he and I first met in the news mines at the Mount Vernon News almost 20 years ago. At that time Zach was still very young, and had become involved with the paper as a part-time sports reporter and photographer.’

A smart and affable conversationalist, he got a kick out of shooting the breeze with the team of reporters the publication had at that time, including Dylan McCament, Anton Hepler, and myself.

We became friends, and that lasted after I left the paper. We had a great chance to reconnect a few years back when I had the opportunity to direct him in a play at the Mansfield Playhouse.

Zach’s schedule sometimes sees him up late at night, which is when my “day job” takes place, so he recently messaged me in the wee hours saying that I really ought to whip up something to be performed at the old Johnny Appleseed Center near Mifflin before it actually gets torn down.

Oh, my. That sure opened up a can of wormy memories.

For those who only know me as a historian, you should know of my previous life as a writer, actor, and director of theater.

For years I specialized in farces at the Mansfield Playhouse, having learned the art of timing at the exacting backhand of the late, great Millie Leverton. (Classic Millie direction, delivered at a grinning actor: “You’re not as funny as you think you are.”)

It was in those years that I combined theater with my growing interest in history and wrote the dramas we put on at Malabar Farm State Park for the first 15 or so years of the century.

Those three shows, Ceely, Phoebe, and Louie, were held in the very non-conventional space of the big barn at Malabar, but they regularly sold out, raising money for the co-producers, the Malabar Farm Foundation, and the Mansfield Playhouse.

The shows were smash successes, and we were twice given awards for outstanding tourism events from the Richland County Foundation.

To this very day, I get people who approach me after my talks, when I’m selling my books, or even just randomly in the grocery store, and ask if we’re ever going to bring the shows
back.

“Sure, if you’re volunteering to produce, direct, rehearse, build set, hang lights, make costumes, promote, and take over roles on short notice,” I reply. That usually stops them.

For a decade and a half, I didn’t have a fall, I had a production. We made memorable shows, and I’ll never regret having done them, but the work level was insane. Plus, I wrote the darn things.

(My favorite direction to hapless actors pointing out that I was telling them to do something different from what my own script said: “Ignore that. This writer clearly knows nothing about the theater.”)

What Zach’s question brought up was a very interesting crossroads moment: The time my productions almost became a local institution on another scale. Almost, but not quite.

One of my great joys during my time at the News was getting involved in the local theater scene in Mount Vernon.

Most intriguingly, I was approached at that time by Heather Petee, a songwriter with an interest in writing songs inspired by history.

(Another aside, and this is a big one: Yes, Heather was known by a different name at that time, and it took her most of her life to make her way to her true self. If you have a problem with that, that’s your problem, not mine. I believe in and support my friends, and I will never back down from that, no matter the political flavor of the month.)

With my historical shows in mind, Heather asked if I would conside working with her to realize an idea that she’d had for a musical, With Pen in Hand, which would present the story of Mount Vernon’s Daniel Decatur Emmett.

History and theater? I was hooked.

We worked extensively on developing those songs and scenes, and we finally mounted the show in The Place @ The Woodward (remember, this was long before the restoration of the grand old theater was finished).

We had such a blast, we worked together on another show after that, Leave M Laugh N, about 19th century American humorists like Mark Twain and Knox County’s own Dan De Quille.

Flush with creative and popular success, we ultimately hit upon a new idea:

We discussed the idea of writing a brand-new show for performance at the now-shuttered Johnny Appleseed facility.

This was an interesting project to contemplate, because what we had in mind was something a bit different from the original show they had mounted at the venue.

For those who don’t know, the Johnny Appleseed Heritage Center was a multi-million-dollar facility that was built to house an outdoor theater production that would tell the life of our region’s most famous folkloric figure.

What they ended up launching was a musical loosely based on Johnny Appleseed, but one that fictionalized a number of details to try and shape it like a traditional musical.

I knew people who were in the show, and I read the script that was used for those original productions, and I wasn’t impressed.

It struck me as a rather Disneyfied gloss on our local history, written by some not from here, and who had no real interest in that history.

It even invented a love interest for Appleseed because the lead in musicals always has to have a romantic interest, right?

Yuck.

Well, that show should have been an adaptation of the maiden voyage of the Titanic, because that’s about how fast it sank. I believe the shows ran for two summers to small crowds before the whole venture tanked.

As someone who actually had mounted historical plays in a non-traditional venue, I felt qualified to analyze the situation, and I saw a number of problems:

1) Heavily fictionalizing historical details in a play just to match a generic format is not good, 2) A large-scale musical seems alien to the very nature of Johnny Appleseed, who was quiet and religious, 3) Expecting Appleseed to carry a show as a dramatic lead is flawed, because he was more of a philosophical character than a dramatic figure, and, above all, 4) The facility was far too large — it was built to seat thousands! — forcing it to try to make a big splash with a huge show that was dramatically unsupportable.

What Heather and I spun out in our discussions addressed these four issues:

1) We wanted to stick closer to the true history of the region, 2) We wanted to make the show more in scale with the subject matter, thus not a big-dance-number musical, but simply a more intimate play with songs, such as we had already created, 3) We identified the true drama not as Appleseed himself, but as the dramatic events involved with the unsettled Ohio frontier in that period, where Appleseed could appear as a leading character, but not be expected to be some kind of heroic lead, and 4) We would adapt the performance space to a more intimate scale, with hopes of attaining a smaller but consistently sustainable audience turnout.

The biggest part of this concept was that the new Appleseed show would not be an all-eggs-in-one-basket prospect, either.

It would be one show within a rotation of our other historical plays, both mine and Heather’s, with the assumption that we would open that rotation up in future years to new original shows by ourselves and other people.

What we were eyeing, in the long run, was no less than the creation of a full-blown summer stock theater program at the Johnny Appleseed Heritage Center, something that could have become nationally famous and run for years, maybe decades.

Heather and I sketched some scenes and songs and then contacted the board of the JAHC to pitch this idea to them. If we had known how bad they were apparently reeling from the collapse of the previous production, I would never even have gone to this step.

But we still thought it might be a viable idea at the time, so we stuck our necks out.

We met with their board, and almost before we could say anything, one of their board members pounced on us and started pronouncing what we would and would not be allowed to portray in the show in terms of Johnny Appleseed’s philosophies.

Okay, their facility, I expect them to have some say in the content, though this didn’t sound like a very collaborative stance.

Then when I explained the idea of shaping the show’s dramatic structure around the events which would include scenes that re-enacted hostilities, that same board member dismissively barked, “No one would watch that.”

This wasn’t going well.

When their board president finally spoke, he said that they were open to the idea of us developing a show and renting the facility from them to present it.

Wait, what? But, yes, we had heard that right.

While we were proposing to do the massive creative undertaking that would create a theatrical engine which could save their floundering facility, they expected us to take the entire financial risk, and then pay them for the privilege of doing so!

We did not agree to this, and frankly had little hope for anything to come out of this after this disastrous meeting.

The president did, however, encourage us to work on our ideas a little further, after which we could engage in further discussion.

So we did, and presented a public read-through of some scenes and songs at a theatrical workshop in Mount Vernon to get feedback.

That at least showed that our dramatic ideas had some legs and that people were interested in what we were brewing.

Then suddenly, one cold winter’s day at work at the News, I received a telephone call from a reporter at the Ashland Times Gazette, with questions about the new show that I was writing for JAHC.

Wait, what? I literally said, “Excuse me?”

The reporter repeated his statement, explaining that someone from the board of the JAHC had told him that we were working on a new show that would be debuting that summer.

You know, there’s an interesting thing that happens when I get mad. With my stage experience and lung power, I can raise a pretty good racket vocally.

But that’s not when you should worry.

When you should worry is if you hear me drop to a very low volume, with every word precisely enunciated. That’s when something is about to hit the fan.

One of my actors once said this voice was possibly the most terrifying thing he’s ever heard. Another called it my “Voice of God” voice, and she definitely meant it in terms of a vengeful, Old Testament God.

I called the president of that board and read him the riot act in precisely that tone of voice.

I was enraged they would dare announce a production when they wouldn’t even allow us the dignity of financially collaborating on the risk of such a venture, let alone actually supporting it with funding and fundraising, even more so when one of their board members was attempting to unilaterally dictate the content of our show before we’d even written it.

I burned that phone line to a crisp. And that, as they say, was that.

The show never happened, Heather and I never finished writing it, and our lives have moved on to other grand adventures.

No history-based summer stock production ever sprouted at the Johnny Appleseed outdoor drama facility, and the whole organization and its exasperating board was soon dissolved.

Now, more than 15 years later, the multimillion-dollar facility sits, empty and
decaying, waiting to be torn down. What a waste.

This story has never before been publicly told, and Zach’s call prompted me to finally get it out there, especially since I now have the soapbox of this column, which allows me to tell my side of some of the historical misadventures I’ve tangled myself in, because it is now literally part of the history of our area.

In the end, I’m at peace with how things went. Not getting further enmeshed in theater gave me the opening to pursue my history writing further, and that’s what led me here
to this space, sharing stories with you, dear readers.

And that, I might add, is what allowed me to start writing historical books. And, to that end, I’ll be appearing at the Cardington-Lincoln Public Library over in Morrow County on Tuesday, Feb. 25, at 5:30 pm, to talk about my book The Ceely Rose Murders at Malabar Farm.

And in additional exciting news, I’ll soon be visiting a recording studio in Columbus to record the audio book version of this title as well.

Meanwhile, I’m rushing into the closing laps of work on my new book, The Maplehurst Murder, due out in September from The History Press.

And I’ll still have my summer and fall this year, instead of massive theatrical production logistics.

Life is good.