Geva play asks: What happened in Hydesville?
By L. David Wheeler

They’ve called this place “the burned-over district,” in reference to a storm of spiritual and religious movements that either originated or flourished in western and central New York in the 19th century.

There were the Mormons, of course, who began in Manchester and Palmyra; and there was the apocalyptic teachings of William Miller, which prefigured the Adventist movement. There was the Oneida Community commune with its complicated sexual network; and then there were the Christian revivalists like Charles G. Finney, who once preached in Rochester for six months.

Among these sweeps of religious fervor was a movement that started with two young girls in tiny Hydesville, once a hamlet in the Wayne County town of Arcadia. They reportedly conversed through unexplained rappings with the spirit of a peddler murdered in their house years before, whom they called “Mr. Splitfoot.”

The teenage Catherine and Margaretta Fox and their older sister Leah became major celebrities — their seances attracting such public figures as Horace Greeley, James Fenimore Cooper and William Lloyd Garrison; their claims sparking both fascination and fury, and serving as a cradle for the Spiritualist faith.

It’s a tale told in Dan O’Brien’s play “The House in Hydesville,” commissioned by Geva Theatre Center with its world premiere Tuesday, Jan. 13, on the Geva stage. The play, directed by Skip Greer, will run through Feb. 8 at the theater’s Mainstage.

Greer and others from Geva had worked with O’Brien before, on a play about a haunting, and they figured he would be just the playwright to bring the story of the Fox sisters — a story without clear-cut answers — to life.

“He has got a tremendous gift of purposeful ambiguity, and taking several different textures and making it work,” Greer said, noting that the play touches on the women’s and abolitionist movements, the “burnedover- district” phenomenon, and the migration inland as the new Erie Canal opened up the state and continent. “He’s placed all that as a landscape in which the Fox sisters grew up.”

The key bit of “purposeful ambiguity” is the obvious question: What was going on in Hydesville? Or, for that matter, wherever the sisters exhibited their ability to produce rappings, even when investigated — such as during a four-night presentation in 1849 at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall, where they were probed by a committee that had them disrobed, searched, and made to stand on pillows and glass. And where, according to one account, they were nearly mobbed by a hostile crowd.

“Whether they were doing it or if it was happening to them — that’s an amazing story,” Greer said.

Were the Foxes (played here by Lauren Orkus and Annie Purcell) and their older sister Leah truly mediums, intermediaries to a spiritual world? Or were they making the whole thing up, deceiving the populace through sleight of hand and muscle control? Or is it not really that simple a question — could it have started out as a hoax but actually tapped into something supernatural? Or, perhaps, were the sisters caught up in something that became much bigger than they could stop, as desperate people sought to communicate with their loved ones?

Could they, in Greer’s words, “have found a truth out of a kind of a lie?” The sisters’ accounts themselves aren’t much help: In later life, their stories varied. Margaretta confessed the whole thing to be a fraud, for instance, then later took the confession back.

Without giving away much, a definitive answer is as unlikely as was the real-life case.

“Probably the primary thought is to examine the birth of a religion and see if we can trace it back to its roots,” Greer said. That provokes further thought: “What is our own need for religion? Is it something we need, or something we create?”

That’s a deep and universal query, and Greer said the play has already sparked some metaphysical discussions.

“When we’ve done the readings, when we finished a public reading of the play, people come down — they want to take to you about experiences that they can’t explain in their own lives.”

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