BRIDGEWATER — Long after they moved on from the Yoh Theatre Players, legions of Woodstock-area alumni and alumnae still hear the voice of company founder and longtime director Harriet Worrell in their heads.
And more than two months after Worrell died of complications from Parkinson’s disease, the Woodstock-area actors and singers and stagehands she nurtured still can hear and picture her words and expressions and postures at least as well those they and their peers assumed onstage in performing works of Shakespeare, of Ionesco, of Beckett, and of, well, Harriet Worrell.
“She changed the trajectory of my life,” fellow Bridgewater resident Collen Doyle recalled recently. “She knew who needed to be pushed.
“With me, she knew to really push.”
Now a professional actor and standup comedian, Doyle first fell under Worrell’s spell in the Yoh Juniors summer camp.
For his first onstage role, he played the last surviving human in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.
And for his final act during his senior year at Woodstock High, he played the lead in the Yoh troupe’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt — all 2 hours and 40 minutes of a role that usually three actors share.
“For someone who struggled in school with dyslexia it was a revelation that someone like her would trust me with something like that,” Doyle said. “After I did it, the way the faculty treated me was different. It changed my feeling of my self-worth.
“That was the jumping-off point that gave me the confidence to go and act for the rest of my life.”
And as Yoh Players graduate Sophie Shackleton recalled of her trajectory, during a memorial service for Worrell on March 21, “I am not the only one” who found confidence to pursue opportunities that few kids from the rural middle of Vermont dared to imagine — whether onstage or behind the scenes.
After graduating from WUHS in 2005, Shackleton majored in theater arts on a scholarship to that experience led to Brown University. Next came a three-year artistic fellowship in Africa, a master’s degree in non-Western performance and, after some detours, her current job as senior producer of cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s musical collaborations and explorations around the world.
“I am up here today because she gave me my life,” Shackleton said of Worrell, adding of all generations of Yoh Players between 1989 and Worrell’s retirement in 2015, “we have arrived where we are … because she taught us the art of being us. She gave us the keys to our universe, and taught us to take it seriously.”
Worrell and her late husband, longtime Woodstock High assistant football coach Chuck Worrell, taught those lessons as well to their three sons and their daughter — first in their native Texas, then in greater Woodstock in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
That change of venue, daughter Perrin Worrell Riendeau and middle son Ramsey Worrell recalled recently, changed everything.
“In Texas, you can’t do sports and theater,” Perrin said. “It’s one or the other — all in. Here, they found a community of people who embraced them in all their roles.”
And the Worrells in turn embraced the community in both roles, with Harriet attending most of the football games and leading the players’ parents in cheers that she wrote, and with Chuck in the offseason building sets and stage managing for Harriet’s plays.
And for a few years, Harriet and Chuck took turns wrangling Ramsey onto the stage of Woodstock’s Little Theatre.
“We’ve all done it, but the other three did it a lot more than I did,” admitted Ramsey, now Woodstock’s head football coach. “I was probably the least enthusiastic of us, but I wasn’t able to avoid it completely.”
Between theater and football — and Chuck’s 20-plus years as WUHS’s driver’s ed instructor — few kids from the Woodstock area could avoid the elder Worrells if they wanted to. In many cases, they encountered them in all three spheres.
“They found a way to play a role in just about every kid’s life,” Ramsey said. “In the theater, my mom recruited a lot of people from the football world who might not ordinarily have done it. A lot of my friends from sports wound up performing in the shows, and loved it. One of my close friends, his senior year, she talked him into doing one small role, and I was stunned at how he took to it.
“She had a way of pulling people in.”
And not just school-age people. Over the years, among the many parents who played a variety of support roles was Gwen Groff, pastor of the Bethany Mennonite Church in Bridgewater Corners. While leading Harriet’s memorial service in May — as she had Chuck’s in the early summer of 2021 — Groff recalled chaperoning one of the Yoh Players’ trips to New York City to see plays on Broadway.
During one outing on public transportation, the artist struck up a conversation with the clergywoman.
“She said to me, ‘You and I are in the same work,’” Groff said. “‘We both are in the business of trying to nurture a community around telling stories, stories that try to make meaning in a world of meaninglessness.’”
By then, Harriet Worrell was preparing to leave that work, with mixed emotions. Chuck had already retired, and was starting to show the effects of Parkinson’s.
And after 26 years of juggling her teaching of the art of stagecraft with the writing of grants to pay her salary and other company expenses — she was an artist-in-residence, not covered in the school’s budget for extracurricular activities — Harriet was ready for a break.
Well: a break from the work, from the rehearsals that often ran till midnight on schoolnights, from the writing and rewriting, but not a lapse into silence. Harriet officiated at weddings of Yoh veterans, and continued to counsel those who were pursuing dreams, however unlikely, in the performing arts. While trying to decide whether to start staging stand-up comedy nights at the old woolen mill in their hometown of Bridgewater, Collen Doyle knew just the voice to consult.
“I’ll never forget what she said to me,” Doyle recalled. “She said, ‘Well, Collen, I’ve got one piece of advice for you: Vermont is our town. If you look at what you’re doing as your market, you’ll find your audience.’”
Eight years later, between acting and teaching gigs in New York and L.A., Doyle, now in his mid-30s, is continuing to host series of comedy nights at the mill. And two months after Worrell’s death, he hopes he can help keep theater alive in his own way, as the ambassador to Italy for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, the famously selective school to which he earned entrance on the strength of a letter of recommendation from … Harriet Worrell.
“She made these incredible opportunities for me,” Doyle said. “You couldn’t help feel like, ‘Wow, that was for me!’ At the same time, she was able to create her vision, and her direction, to not just sell tickets, but to really engage young people in theater.”
In return for her own opportunities, Sophie Shackleton hoped to arrange for Harriet, aka Yoh Mama, to meet Shackleton’s boss, Yo-Yo Ma, maybe even to have him play the cello for her, while she could still appreciate the moment.
Then, Shackleton said during the memorial service, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world in general and live performance in particular. And by the time the world was reopening, Ma was picking up his schedule again. Then Chuck Worrell died.
Finally, late this past winter, Perrin Worrell Riendeau called Shackleton to warn that Harriet was approaching her final curtain — just when Ma was heading out for his first vacation in a year. On a work trip, Shackleton did manage to bid goodbye to her mentor by phone, but after Harriet died — the day after the Ides of March, Shackleton was berating herself for not just going in person to the house in Bridgewater Corners, instead of spinning her wheels to set up a summit of “two geniuses with the same values” that wasn’t destined to happen.
“I wanted to find a way to tell her how much she meant to me,” Shackleton lamented. “I could have done that myself.”
A few days before the memorial service, the surviving genius consoled and counseled his young producer and colleague by phone from vacation.
“He said … ‘I didn’t know (Harriet), but you know what the lesson is, and I know it, too: … Don’t worry so much. Don’t question yourself. You have all the tools now. She wants you to go for it. Now is the time.’ … She needs you to go into the world and continue the work. Evolve it. Make it bigger. Give it to others. Her work was done.
“Now, the work is yours.’”
(The Worrell children and the Yoh Theatre Players will host a ‘celebration of life/production party’ at the Barnard Town Hall, on Aug. 13 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.)
David Corriveau can be reached at dacorriveau@gmail.com