There was a fascination with the idea of German escaped prisoners and spies that might be hiding out on Omena Point during both of the World Wars. Mary Louis Vail remembered a play the cottagers of Ingalls Bay put on back then using a blanket strung between two trees behind the Saxon house for the curtain. Elizabeth and Betty Saxon played the leading roles in the spy thriller which took place, of course, on Omena Point.
Ingall Side Players – Courtesy Laurie Remter
However all that Mary Louis remembered about this play is one line: the heroine is strolling down a path through the woods when she comes across the soon to be villain who, holding up his hand in pain, exclaims in his best German, “I did not see you come, and this sharp thorn has stuck me in the thumb!”
Plays every Summer
In the 1940’s Peg Deal remembers that a play was done every summer on Ingall’s Bay. She remembers that women from all down the beach participated. Pat Kulick directed them and they were held at The Hemlocks where a stage was set up in the large bedroom.
Program for Aria Da Capo by The Ingall Side Players
Laurie Remter’s grandmother, Helen Clark Reed, majored in drama at the University of Kansas (Class of 1918), and was involved in amateur theater in Swarthmore, PA. It is said the Clark’s all had a dramatic flair about them. Helen was the lead in the play photos here, and probably was the director as well. You can see this “dramatic flair” in the photos.
This play is a one act by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a prizewinning playwright who was born poor in Maine, but became a noted feminist activist, and an award winning poet and playwright. Aria Da Capio, written in 1919, is a morality play featuring two young shepherds, a young woman called Columbine and the “mask of tragedy, Cothurnus”.
Most critics called it a pacifist, anti-war play in which the lead characters are murdered because of greed and suspicion. It is said to be a thought provoking play “not to be missed”.
Courtesy of Laurie Remter, “Omena, A Place in Time”, Omena Historical Society, and Poetry Foundation.
