I am not a big fan of costumed interpreters.
Last year, my sister Trish and I went to Cooperstown, NY. We’re both baseball kind of gals, so the main draw was the Hall of Fame. But we also wanted to take in the Farmers Museum, an interesting little reconstructed village, vintage early-mid 1800’s. We were there at a non-busy time of year, and just wanted to spend a little time meandering around and sticking our heads in to the various houses and shops. Each time we looked in and saw a costumed interpreter, we backed out. Engaging with someone pretending to be an 1820’s schoolmarm or shopkeeper? No, thanks.
This not wanting to engage with someone in period garb does not hold 100% of the time. When, on the same trip, we toured Washington Irving’s home in Sleepy Hollow, we really enjoyed the docents or interpreters or whatever they were called. They were extremely pleasant and informative. Maybe it worked because they weren’t pretending to be contemporaries of Irving. Just (amateur, I think) historians who wanted to share their knowledge about Irving, his life, his home, his family, his work. It was fascinating.
That brings me to Plimoth Plantation.
What with this being Thanksgiving week, there’s a lot of attention being paid to this museum, which is yet another reconstructed village – this one dating back even further than the Farmers Museum or the Washington Irving house. They’re all about the early days of the pilgrims in Massachusetts, i.e., the 17th century.
The wooden structures alone are sufficient to convey the horror of living in ye particular olde days. Dark, drafty, cold, smoky. Uncomfortable furniture. Bad food. No plumbing. Ill health. And the overall no-fun, piety on steroids life of the pilgrims.
Life back then was nasty and brutish and, if you were among the fortunate ones, short.
I didn’t need a costumed interpreter to tell me that.
I’ve only been to Plimoth Plantation once, a dozen years back, when my sister Kath and I took our nieces.
Frankly, we all found the “authenticity” of the interpreters off-putting and embarrassing. Of course, I don’t even like the authenticity of Plimoth vs. Plymouth. But I really find the interpreters’ presence is subtractive rather than additive. Part of this is just personal preference. I’d rather read something on a placard, or converse with humans in contemporary English, then pretend I’m having a convo with someone from the wayback.
That said, I’d be fine if they threw in a couple of words from the olden days. Who doesn’t want to know that people didn’t say something was backward, they said “arsy varsy”? Now, that’s a term I wouldn’t mind see make a comeback.
Anyway, for obvious reasons, Plimoth Plantation is in the news this week. I have some sympathy for the journalists. I mean, there are only so many times when the journalist stuck with writing up the annual article is going to want to cover corn, midden piles, and terms like “arsy varsy.” So this year’s edition of the Boston Globe’s ‘what up at Plimoth Plantation?’article deals with labor unrest.
I don’t think we’re supposed to say things like “the natives are restless” anymore. So I won’t. But some of the employees are.
“Turmoil,” corrects Peter Follansbee, a former employee who left in frustration in 2014 after 20 years as a craftsman at the plantation, “would be tame.”
In the aftermath of a bitter movement to unionize, some plantation workers — mainly the actors who assume 17th-century personas and inhabit the re-created village like Pilgrims of yore — say they are being overworked and bullied, and they fear management is slowly undoing the living museum’s greatness.
One of their concerns is that there are fewer interpreters there than there used to be. I am sympathetic to workers rights, etc., and I get that the job of interpreter, as a steady job, was probably a real prize for actors. But in my book, fewer interpreters would be a good thing. And if I have no patience with interpreters, I can only imagine what the school kids who are the mainstay of visits to PP must feel. Kids would have no patience with a geezer like me asking questions about what was taught in school or how to make rose hip jelly – which I would do if I knew the answers weren’t going to come back at me with ‘good morrow, my good woman, ye are most curious about our lives’ language. Let alone with someone playacting as if they still lived in 1621 and could well recall the moment they stepped toe onto Plymouth Plimoth Rock.
I know absolutely nothing about current pedagogy, but I’m guessing there are better ways to reach today’s kids than through interpreters.
Anyway, some employees are obviously disgruntled, while management seems to be gruntling along just fine.
In an interview, Plimoth spokeswoman Kate Sheehan rejected the notion of a museum in crisis.
The plantation sits in a strong position, she said, though she declined to comment on specific issues, saying the museum has put the labor dispute behind it.
(The labor dispute involved union organizing, union trashing and harassment, a narrow win for the organizes and a subsequent vote among employees to de-unionize. There’s another attempt afoot to unionize the workforce. Sounds more 1920’s than 1620’s, but you can’t stay in persona 24/7. Anyway, I do wish the employees luck.)
Several current and former employees said they believe the roots of the dispute and the current unhappiness lie ultimately in a feeling among some workers that management is attempting to strip the plantation of what has long made it unique — its devotion to “living history.”
The site’s actors, or “interpreters,” have long strived to ensure that every detail of the 17th-century village — from the type of wood used to build houses to the vocabulary employed when addressing visitors — is true to the time. Many study the period on their own, and some have even traveled abroad to learn more about the era they’re reconstructing.
So some employees bristled at changes they feel threaten that authenticity, including modern information placards inside the Colonial homes and the presence of managerial staff dressed in T-shirts and nametags walking the Colonial village.
Okay. I’m all for those modern information placards, which I would find useful. And managerial staff with nametags? Why not?
I have a pretty good imagination, and I can imagine pretty good just how grim life must have been back in that day. Some guy in a T-shirt and nametag isn’t going to detract from that. And someone pretending that Plimoth Plantation is actually their lied experience isn’t going to add to it.
Just sayin’…(Or forsooth sayeth me.)
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