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    • HOME and ABOUT
    • Music & Development Goals
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  • HOME and ABOUT
  • Music & Development Goals
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  • Creative Team

GONE ASTRAY, the musical

GONE ASTRAY, the musicalGONE ASTRAY, the musicalGONE ASTRAY, the musical

Librettist: Jennie Staniloff-Redling

Composer/Lyricist: Edward Koban

CLICK TO CONTACT: Mark Orsini, BRET ADAMS, LTD.
Deer in forest

about

WHAT WOULD YOU DO...

...if the most precious thing in the world to you is suddenly taken away? What would you do if your eleven year old daughter was abducted? What lengths would you go to get her back? 


In the new musical GONE ASTRAY, based on an award winning play by Jennie Staniloff-Redling who adapted her play for this musical,  a mother whose 

daughter was abducted years earlier enlist the help of a Lakota young woman to help find her. When the white mother and Native young woman clash, they are unprepared for the sacrifices and truths they will face.  A score by award winning writer Mohawk composer Edward Koban adds  Native music for a story about truth, learning and love.

Synopsis

 Raven O'Mally was a child drawn to nature, in contrast to her mother, Grace, steeped in Roman Catholic ritual. Unlike her first child, Winston, a developmentally disabled boy, Grace idolizes her daughter. At the age of fifteen, Raven is abducted. As years pass with no sign of her, Grace clutches fiercely to the conviction that her daughter is alive and will return on her twentieth birthday. When that day is tomorrow, Abbie Harjo, a Lakota young woman who claims to possess powers of finding what has been lost, arrives at the O'Mally door. Grace is delighted but as her husband and son embrace the girl who does not share Grace’s hope, Grace explodes in accusations that Abbie is a fake. Abbie has in fact, been conning Whites with invented ceremonies for years, but now, aroused, she cites Grace as an example of her people's lied-to White abusers, claiming Raven’s loss can’t compare with the hundreds of girls missing and murdered on reservations. Only when unearthly Native forces, that Abbie has long scorned, intervene, does forgiveness come. Each woman makes a sacrifice, with Abbie’s so ultimate as to enlighten Grace and break the spell that has long gripped both of the women's hearts. But this Abbie is completely altered, aware of her own endowments and purpose, with courage to face a fearsome but transcendent destiny, one which Grace, for all her dreams and prayers, could never have imagined. ​

EARLY RESPONSE

 ​" Wowee! What a stupendous read and listen.  I love musicals that unfold loss and grief into hope. Such a hard thing to do really, to make you want to lean into the journey. And you’ve really managed something singular with big themes and undercurrents echoing through. I love how big it feels through your staging devices and I also love how imperfect the characters we’re rooting for are... What an exceptional piece of writing and adaptation, Jennie. We are so excited and proud of you! "      

   

        Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, 

        HBO creators &  writers (BIG LOVE, GETTING ON)


BACKGROUND

BACKGROUND

BACKGROUND

The original stage play of GONE ASTRAY was praised by theatres across the country. The play received awards and distinction for its writing style and unique voice by Off-Broadway Theatres Manhattan Theatre Club, steppenwolf, theatre company and others. Numerous theatres selected the play for readings at their theatre festivals of new work (Urban Stages, Ensemble Studio Theatre, among others). In spite of this recognition, a full commercial production did not occur. That was twenty years ago. Today, a story featuring the dramatic influence of a contemporary First Nations character upon a White American couple entrenched in Roman Catholic ritual can resonate, thanks to a long overdue awakening encompassing this nation and Canada. 

BACKGROUND

BACKGROUND

The present awareness of the need to acknowledge the value of the Native community brings a fresh view of a play reflecting that need, made increasingly exceptional with a Broadway and Native musical score.   Edward Koban, a Mohawk composer and lyricist is a renowned and highly regarded musician throughout the Native nations in the United States and in Canada. Together, Librettist Jennie Staniloff-Redling and Ed Koban have worked to bring a pertinent story of both White and Native featured characters in GONE ASTRAY to life in a new way.

CAST

  

GRACE O'MALLY
 

Edgy white woman, 40's, a former smoker, a public smiler, an expert. Harbors guilt for giving birth to a developmentally disabled son (Winston) , blaming herself. When her daughter, Raven, is born, she treasures the child as a rebirth of her trust in mothering and herself. With the horror of Raven’s abduction, she cannot allow herself to grieve lest the pain kill her, but fights the trauma with obsession, driven by a terror of alighting in one place long enough to feel and an implacable grip onto the assurance that Raven cannot possibly be dead. Grace freezes their home into a state of expectation, Raven’s room untouched, and turns to Roman Catholic rituals concerning the holiest of mothers, the Virgin Mary to be her advocate. She feeds Winston the highest calory sweets possible to make him too heavy to fit out of their front door and compels him to speak and not rely on American Sign Language (ASL, which he prefers for its wealth of expression) so that she knows where he is every second. When an entirely opposite worldview in the form of a girl who is one with nature, almost parallel to Raven, even in age, Grace is thrown. She flounders, loosening her grip  on the reins one moment, grasping them desperately, the next. 

 
 

FRANK O'MALLY

 

Grace’s husband, a mechanic, a sodden hulk of a man, 50's, white, stalwart, collects beers of the world, drinks them. Winston’s serious birth defects compels him to try, in vain, to appease Grace's self-blame, but she shuts him out in an effort to “fix” her mistake. The distance between them is replaced by a fascination with exotic brands of beer in contrast to the ubiquitous American brands he drinks with his buddies. This consumes him and dulls his pain, until the birth of their perfect daughter, Raven, who makes life worth living. When he and Grace, subsequently enjoy their parenthood and each other, all is well. But when Raven is taken, noting can heal the pain. Frank's only recourse is to return to his beer collection. But then a Native American girl with keen perceptions about life resonate with him so that he is enlightened and finds a new strength.  But the grief he has buried soon bubbles to the surface with other suppressed feelings and for the first time, he experiences freedom and release. With it, comes moral determination. 

  
 

WINSTON O'MALLY

  

[Deaf Community actor]. Grace and Frank’s deaf, obese, developmentally disabled son, 22. Guilelessness itself. He communicates with his parents using ASL (American Sign Language) and speaks. When voiced, Winston has a noticeable deaf accent. He is a perpetually innocent child living in a world where he expresses inner feelings with imagined and summoned, masterful musical work of the ages. His mother has created an almost symbiotic relationship, filling his world, but he is drawn more to his father whose suffering he intuits. Winston’s insights are further sharpened when Abbie appears, so similar to his sister and so counter to his mother. He instantly senses Abbie's  potential depth of love and trusts her to heal the darkness that has embraced him and his parents. 

 
 

ABBIE HARJO

 
[Native American actor, any tribal affiliation] Young Lakȟóta American woman, 20. Sly, haunted, belligerent beneath a false obsequiousness, thus, more than she seems. Spent her childhood and adolescent years on a reservation where connection to nature and respect for the culture of ancestors exist side by side with poverty and indifference from the White world whose authority controls her community’s lifestyle and threatens their improvement. Like many of her peers, her grandparents hold pain within from past Roman Catholic church invasion of indigenous communities to take children into residential schools where they were mentally, emotionally and physically harmed and often killed. The schools sought to obliterate the children’s culture and the punishing experiences carried intergenerational, psychological and emotional injury down to Abbie and her friends. Her brother with whom she was close, took his own life. At that point, to combat the pain of hopelessness, she, like many her age, dismissed the strength and honor of her ancestors and escaped the Rez, seeking any form of pride, settling upon invented melodramatic performances that tourists and other Whites paid for, believing her false assurance that they were powerful spells. She was rewarded not only with money, but with the satisfaction that she was paying back the injustice that harmed her family. On one of these excursions off the Rez, she invented a ceremony that evoked an unexpected memory of a vision she had a year earlier about a girl her age being violated. It was so strong that she felt something was calling her, that she had a purpose. The feeling led her to the O’Mallys. 

  
 

DAVE TRUMBULL

 

County Sheriff, any age/ethnicity. He is sarcastic, affects the world-weariness expected of him. Manages the police department in his small borough, dealing with mostly petty offenses that have resulted in a certain indolence. Dave's work has limited his scope emotionally and that is how he prefers it. He is charmed by Grace and supports her conscientious work to educate parents how to protect their children even though he sees the real world sharply. He deals with his close relationship to Frank and Grace by not engaging with, or offering a remedy for, their obvious personal troubles. 

 
 

ENSEMBLE/CHORUS

  

Middle-aged neighbors/friends, Native, Visionary characters. Three men, three women, any ethnicity.

 
 

 


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