The Real Genius of Theater is How it Builds Community: Remembering Jean Wilhelm in Eastport

The towering Eastport Arts Center,
formerly a Baptist Church in Maine's
easternmost community.

As theater makers, we deal in physicalities.

The voices and bodies of actors. The buildings and stages in which we gather audiences and create imaginary worlds that heal our hearts and minds, that build new, temporary mini-communities with every performance. We learn to and honor being present in our bodies and places.

Our work often involves buildings -- saving old ones and at times building new to house our stages, roofs under which to bring people together.

So it was with our dear compatriot Jean Wilhelm throughout her career, but especially in the last two decades as she helped to purchase an old Baptist church in Eastport, Maine -- our nation's most eastern outpost -- and create the Eastport Arts Center.

As its website says, "The Eastport Arts Center (EAC) nurtures and promotes six year-round constituent groups engaged in theater, art, music, film education and community outreach."

Music to Jean's ears, and a song to my soul.

Jean, who was in her late '70's already when she relocated to Eastport, didn't do this on her own. She worked closely with another woman, Joyce Weber, who died two years before Jean, as well as many, many community members. Because in theater we don't do anything on our own. Theater is the art of the ensemble, of community. It is about bringing people together to share an experience, "to breathe," as one friend of mine said, "the same air."

This is its most potent power for change.

Jean Wilhelm memorabilia at her memorial
service August 13, 2022  in Eastport, Maine.

From the moment Jean sought us out at Opera House Arts in Stonington we knew she was a kindred soul. She believed deeply in the need for every community member to participate in and experience art of all forms. We asked her, in 2008, to direct a community playreading and she chose three exquisite short plays by Tennessee Williams: "The Lady of Larkspur Lotion," "27 Wagons Full of Cotton," "Portrait of a Madonna." The language in these plays is almost ridiculously beautiful, stunning, and Jean guided the community members young and old -- most unfamiliar with the work of Williams -- to find themselves within these stories from the 1940's.

Jean had fairly auspicious roots but, born in
1927 and graduating from high school in 1943, she became a woman during a time when being independent was not the norm. She had to, and did, literally sail her own course: straight through Smith College where she worked with the iconic Hallie Flanagan and on through advanced degrees in theater at West Virginia University and the University of Minnesota, on to the University of New South Wales in Australia and Goucher College in Maryland and finally on up the Maine coast. It was while getting her PhD in Minnesota that she forcefully introduced herself for hire to the legendary director Sir Tyrone Guthrie; opening up, as she said, "a whole wonderful sequence of events" including directing Guthrie's infamous worldwide touring version of Oedipus Rex in Australia in 1970-71.

The thing that most resonated with us about Jean was not even her artistic work -- we traveled up to see both Brian Friel's "Dancing at Luhnasa" and Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" under her hand in Eastport -- but her dedication to democracy: in civic life as well as in theater. The two came together for Jean as they do for us.

Jean's official President Obama
commemorative photo.

For example, at her memorial service on August 13, 2022, I newly learned she had been in front of the Eastport post office every Saturday -- protesting George W. Bush's falsified war in Iraq. She shamelessly supported Democratic candidates, including Obama. Her small-D democratic values powered her work -- as it did our own.

Jean's nephew Bill deBlasio, former Mayor of NYC.

As her most famous nephew, Bill deBlasio, former mayor of NYC noted at the beginning of his comments Saturday, the beautiful photo of Jean and Joyce talking with each other, taken by a student, was right out of the Nixon era of "un-indicted conspiracists." It turns out the two actually WERE conspiring at that moment, seated on a bench in the unfinished upstairs theater space above where the photography workshop was happening -- plotting the creation of the Arts Center.

In Jean's bright blue eyes, the world was always wonderful and marvelous and the charge was always ONWARD! This is just the expansive, glass overflowing attitude we in theater and really in all our lives need to accomplish our work and improve our communities, or so much of it would never get done. It is a world in which, in Jean's own words, death is “not frettable.” (sic)

ONWARD! dear Jean. And ONWARD! all of you making moments of beauty that gather and heal those around you, whether through theater or faith or civic duty.

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