Shakespeare took the shape of trapeze tricks, aerial fabrics and Chappell Roan dance breaks on Friday night at Hilltown Youth Recovery Theatre’s 15th summer spectacle, “Twelfth Night.” According to the program’s co-founder Dr. Jonathan Diamond, around 475 visitors stopped by over the four show nights.
In the open field behind the Heath Elementary School building, the performance catapulted to a start at 6:40 p.m. with campers age 10 to 21 floating and flipping through the air and striking poses in the silks.
10-year-old camper Thomas Kitchen strikes his favorite pose in the silks STAFF PHOTO/AALIANNA MARIETTA 
campers perform trapeze tricks with their teachers STAFF PHOTO/AALIANNA MARIETTA 
campers carry fellow performers on a platform during a scene as audience cheers along STAFF PHOTO/AALIANNA MARIETTA 
Sarah Close roars a soliloquy as campers skip around her in the forest theater STAFF PHOTO/AALIANNA MARIETTA 
campers finish their performance in the field outside while the sun sets STAFF PHOTO/AALIANNA MARIETTA
Trapeze teachers Arlie Hart, his son Sam Hart, and Anna Speck refer to trapeze art as “flying.” According to Guilford resident and director of the aerial trapeze program Arlie Hart, when Hilltown campers learn to fly, they learn to trust themselves and the adults there to catch them. With each new trick, Hart sees their confidence fly too.
“It changes the ‘them’ they see in the mirror,” Hart said. Instead of the same face peering back, he believes the kids begin to think, “This is me who throws flips, this is me that gets caught, this is me that can swing, this is me that climbs the ladder.”
Anna Speck started flying at Hilltown 11 years ago. Now, she works at Circus Academy New York with Sam Hart and teaches at Hilltown.
“It gives me a sense of control in a way that I often can’t control in other aspects of my life,” Speck described.
While Speck flies for the control, new Hilltown flier Tiaya Ruggierello from Girdwood, Alaska flies for the control and the freedom. “It’s a really beautiful, freeing feeling, it’s very liberating,” Ruggirello said. “You’re the only one up there.”
At Hilltown’s summer camp, trapeze represents only one art form the campers overcoming trauma, addiction, anxiety, depression and other behavioral health challenges learn. In each activity lies lessons for healing.
Dr. Jonathon Diamond, a Heath resident and practicing psychotherapist in Northampton, founded the Hilltown Youth Theatre Summer Workshop in 2010 after working in chemical dependency treatment for over 30 years. In 2015, he started the Recovery Theatre with co-founder Alyssa F. Wright in response to the opioid crisis in Franklin County. Last year, the program earned a $100,000 grant from the Mosaic Opioid Recovery Partnership, a collaboration between the Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Substance Addiction Services and RIZE Massachusetts. Diamond said more than half of the 75 campers connect with this goal.
The co-founder and executive director has noticed a trend towards therapeutic theater. He stressed that this program is different; it heals through the stakes of its art.
“There’s nothing per se magical about theater,” Diamond said. “You can’t just pull out a book of theater games and expect that to be therapeutic.” Instead, “When there’s skin in the game, there’s got to be fear, there’s got be edge,” he explained, referring to the trapeze, aerial fabrics and Shakespeare’s roaring monologues charged with nerves.
Co-director and native of Shelburne Falls and Heath Raia LeBreux joined in preschool. Now 18, she teaches aerial fabrics at Hilltown.
“It’s this controlled fear,” LeBreux described while braiding her co-director Izzie Miller’s hair before the show.
Nineteen-year-old assistant set director Jyn Rankin said they joined four years ago after a mental health low. Their parent presented two options: a partial hospitalization program or Hilltown. Rankin, a Greenfield resident, said the decision was a no-brainer. “I had been to see some of the shows and I was like, ‘They have a flying trapeze, are you kidding me!'”
Flying through the air, Rankin tells themself, “This is an anxious moment, but I can breathe through it.” However, they added, “Breathe through it mostly, the belts are very tight,” Rankin laughed.
During trapeze lessons, Hart said he often asks the kids, “If you can do this, what can’t you do?”
After playing with gravity, the barefoot performers trickled to other corners of the field as the audience followed. They settled in the forest for the majority of the play. Necks craned when one young actor hollered from a tree.
While a few of the actors performed, the other campers and directors reacted with cackles, gasps, and “ooh”s in a circle around them.
Lines like, “I have many ops in Orsino’s Court” and “Yo bro, you good?” kicked the play’s poetry and grand soliloquies into the modern day. With parodies of “Sexy Back” and “Single Ladies” and a “Pink Pony Club” dance break, the campers’ joy spread to parents and visitors who clapped and sang along.
“When we started doing Shakespeare, we wanted to make it perfect,” guest acting teacher Tyrus “Ty” Lemerande said. He and his wife, Amy McLaughlin Lemerande, own Knighthorse Theatre Company in Wellfleet. “Over 20 years of teaching, we realized perfect doesn’t matter, all that matters is the kids have fun, the audience laughs.”
Twenty-one-year-old artistic director Sarah Close wrote the boisterous adaptation. She started acting at Hilltown at 12 years old when she found theater to be a slow breath amidst her anxious thoughts. While she initially acted to escape, she said each play helped her embrace who she was off script. This past summer, she commuted from New York City to help the new group heal through acting her words.
She and the other directors also lead recovery intensives throughout the year, including Lantern Light Trainings. From 8 p.m. to midnight, individuals and often entire families move their bodies and respond through words or art to prompts designed to “help participants bind and repair past traumas,” Dr. Diamond explained.
Twenty-year-old Greenfield resident Izzy Miller joined Hilltown three years ago after a Lantern Light Training.
“It was the freedom to be silly; the freedom to really be human,” Miller said sitting on the grass as LeBreux braided their hair before the show. They remembered thinking, “This is the place I can breathe and take a breath and not sugarcoat anything.” After that, Miller was hooked.
The young group of directors also run recovery lunches to check in with campers and meet with kids considering Hilltown for their recovery.
When Close pitches the program, she tells them her experience. “It’s the only place that I know of where anyone with any experience can come and feel immediately at home and welcome,” Close said. She believes Hilltown understands the connection between the mind and body.
“It starts with the things you love, to deal with the things you hate,” she said.
In the final section of the play, visitors and performers returned to the open field. Charlemont resident Scarlet Kitchen grinned from the grass as she watched her son wrap himself into poses in the aerial fabrics.
Speaking of the campers, Kitchen said, “They’re totally out of their comfort zone, but they’re so comfortable there.”
Aalianna Marietta can be reached at amarietta@recorder.com.
