View From the Green

A Nod to Isabella Eldridge

By Lloyd Garrison

With the town fast approaching its 250th anniversary, the annual play performed last month in the library by women of the Isabella Eldridge Club (the “Isabellas,”) took on new meaning.
As the stage manager in Jack O’Malley’s adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” Betsy Gill’s task was to set the scene and convey what Norfolk was like in the time of Isabella Eldridge in the 1880s. With the name of the play changed to “Bella,” Gill told the audience: “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”
Before composing “Bella,” O’Malley delved deeply into Wilder’s portrayal of the fictional New England town of Grover’s Corners in the same time period. He pondered whether the character of Isabella Eldridge, who was such a dominant figure in the life of Norfolk, had any relevance to the present. His conclusion: the values espoused by Eldridge have evolved and still define the essence of Norfolk today.
O’Malley’s research also led him to believe that the women who performed in “Bella” are themselves an extension of a purposeful woman whose passion was the library, which she and her sister gave to the town. Eldridge saw to it that the library became a focal point for volunteer activity of all sorts, and especially in pursuit of the arts, culture and intellectual discourse. Eldridge would be pleased that the club bearing her name continues this tradition at monthly meetings in which members take turns addressing a variety of subjects, from what is new in contemporary painting to what is new in China.
Ann Havemeyer, “Bella’s” director, was very conscious of the political implications of the original play, in which Wilder sanctified the innate goodness of the individual at a time of grave global uncertainty.
When “Our Town” appeared in theatres in 1938, the depression had put millions of Americans out of work. World War II was imminent. Politics were rent by the warring ideologies of capitalism, fascism and communism.
In the “Our Town” of ’38, the stage manager muted those anxieties by stating that our town and our world “…is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself.”
In “Bella” of 2008, the Reverend Joseph Eldridge says the same but differently: “…love one another! I go now, and I say to you: The greatest strength is a tenderness of spirit.”
That would seem to epitomize the way in which Norfolkians get together to sort out how to celebrate their 250 years of existence, while also divining a town plan for the future. And as detailed elsewhere in this issue, it is a tenderness of spirit that impels the Lions Club to hold a spaghetti dinner to benefit Meadowbrook, or Stefanie Hinman to take a not so usual spring break to assist children orphaned by war in Uganda.
Meanwhile, the library, with its books and its exhibits and its “Bella,” is still a focal point for the community as Eldridge envisioned it. “Norfolk has always been a yearning town, always working to better itself,” says O’Malley. “And that is the core value that continues right through to today.”