THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

"Summer Dreams'': TCC to show love story set in Dismal Swamp

By Margaret Windley

October 21, 2004

The terrible beauty of the Dismal Swamp became familiar to playwright Sheri Bailey in the summer of 2003.

She and Harvey E. Jones assembled a cast and crew to film "Summer Dreams," an adaptation of one act from Bailey's "Summers in Suffolk" play about five generations of the fictitious Clarke family from 1870 to 1992.

The movie, which will be shown three times on Tuesday at Tidewater Community College's Jeanne & George Roper Performing Arts Center on Granby Street, is a love story set in 1957. "Summer Dreams" juxtaposes the lives of young lovers Monroe Roosevelt and Edna Wilder with those of Maggie and Esper Brinkley, a young married couple.

"The story is about the power of first love," said Bailey, 46. "It's the fine line between insanity and sanity when you are in love."

But the story's main setting - the Dismal Swamp - serves as almost another character, according to Bailey, a TCC college professor and Portsmouth School Board member.

"By 1957, the Dismal Swamp has become a place of myth," said Bailey . "People go into it to visit the Conjure Woman, Mama Mojo. It's the viewer's choice whether the Conjure Woman truly exists. It's a question of how much the audience trusts the various characters."

Other settings in the movie, which was shot on a $20,000 budget, are less exotic. They include inside an old Texaco building at Granby Street and Olney Road in Norfolk and at Portsmouth City Park and a house in the Mount Hermon/Port Norfolk section of the same city .

Bailey chose to place the tale in 1957 because she saw that as the transitional year of the 1950s.

"It was almost like the beginning of the 1960s," she said. "It was the calmness of the 1950s in its last hours. In the story there is an element of the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. One of our main characters returned to start a NAACP chapter."

The swamp was a significant place for Bailey in her youth. She spent summers with relatives in North Suffolk on the edge of the Dismal Swamp although the rest of the year she was in Portsmouth's Norcom Park with her parents, Claudette and Russell Hurdle.

However, the stories are not autobiographical, although the stuff of life around her has gone into the tale, Bailey said.

That includes a story from her childhood, in which the ghost of a relative returns to give advice to a family member.

"It was based on a story my mother told me, almost action by action," said Bailey. "She saw her aunt Viola playing on the piano in a purple dress when she had been dead for about a month."

The ghost "turned to her and told her, 'the road will be hard but you will travel it well.' About a month later her father died in an auto accident. Aunt Viola's visit was a sign to tell her to be strong," Bailey said.

In the movie, the ghost appears to the character Esper Brinkley when he was a child. In that scene, Esper is played by 10-year old Justin Ray, a student at John Tyler Elementary School in Portsmouth.

Co-directors of the film were Robert Alford, a Yale School of Drama graduate, and Nancy Cheryll Davis, actor and co-founder of Los Angeles-based Towne Street Theatre. Bailey spent 15 years working in theater in Los Angeles before returning here.

Proceeds from the TCC screenings will be donated to the non profit Juneteenth Festival Company, which was founded by Bailey in 1995. Its mission includes commemorating the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of slavery in the United States.

Under its umbrella, the Juneteenth Players is a theater troupe dedicated to presenting dramas based in local history in local schools.

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