newsminer.com

What: Staged reading of "The Day That Cries Forever"

When: 7 p.m. Saturday

Where: Salisbury Theatre, UAF Fine Arts Building

Admission: Free, but donations will be accepted

On March 27, 1964, the tiny village of Chenega was swallowed up by the tsunamis that followed the Good Friday earthquake. Fewer than 100 people lived in Chenega, which is located in Prince William Sound, and nearly a quarter of them didn’t survive.

It’s a powerful moment in Alaska history, which was recollected by the survivors of the tragedy in a series of interviews with the Chenega Corp., the area Native corporation.

Their stories will be unveiled on Saturday at a free staged reading of “The Day That Cries Forever” at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Salisbury Theatre. Dale Seeds, a professor of theater and dance at College of Wooster in Ohio, was introduced to a book of the same title in 2005 and crafted the interviews into a screenplay.

The reading, with minimal staging and direction, will present the play to the public for the first time. All of it is taken from transcripts from actual survivors of the tsunamis, except for a fictional Orthodox priest that Seeds included to narrate and add continuity to the story.

“To me the sanctity of the words is important,” Seeds said. “I didn’t want to tinker with that.”

The accounts are offered by various survivors, many of whom have different viewpoints of the same events. A 14-year-old boy at boarding school lost both his parents; a child felt the ground as it shook like Jell-O; a woman was swept out to sea, but survived by clinging to debris.

Seeds, who has collaborated with the UAF theater department for more than a decade, said the stories still resonate. The tsunamis that swept through Indian Ocean communities in 2004, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had similarly tragic consequences.

“I thought there were a lot of lessons there … This is how people persevere,” he said.

The director of the reading, Maya Salganek, recruited nearly half her cast during the Festival of Native Arts. She didn’t want a cast of polished performers, and supplemented the seven-member group with graduate students and a few experienced actors. They’ll combine to read 25 “roles” of people who are in the play.

“I actually didn’t want actors to be reading it,” Salganek said. “I didn’t want to dramatize the already dramatic nature of these stories.”

During a month of rehearsals and discussions, the piece continues to be refined and modified. Salganek said having Alaskans working on the cast — and providing feedback — has helped give the play an added level of authenticity.

Seeds said the next step for the script is still uncertain. He’s pondered turning it into a documentary, or polishing the screenplay to be something that Native theater groups could perform. He said he is particularly interesting in getting feedback from the Chenega Corp., which conducted the original interviews.

“They always need to be involved in some way, because it is their story,” he said.