Theater Review (NYC): ‘This Will All Be Yours’ by Laura Pedersen and Charles Bloom

In 1970  factory farms, big pharma, corporate land devastation, and the deleterious effects of pesticides, herbicides, and chemicals in our food and water supply were subterranean issues not publicized in the mainstream media.  Small family  farms dotted the landscape and the obsession with making profits in the face of human harm was only whispered about behind closed doors. By the 1980s-1990s there had been a paradigm shift. A bucolic, stress-free way of life , nutritious and delicious produce, nightly home cooked meals, mom and dad closely supervising their children, and a pastoral landscape had transmuted into a pressure cooker existence of traffic jams, subdivisions, less vacation time, processed convenience foods, parents working two jobs, and suburban over development in the wake of urban blight.

This Will All Be Yours is a vibrant musical production directed by Ludovica Villar-Hauser that highlights the beginning of this transitional time. It turns a brilliant, focused spotlight on the Price family farm in 1979 western New York, representative of many such family farms during a time of upheaval which is still happening today in different parts of the country.  Through an excellent musical score by Charles Bloom and pithy, rich book by Laura Pedersen,  we share the family’s personal triumphs and let-downs, as the two sons and the daughter are caught up in the swirling currents of social change which force the entire family to make hard choices. Should they transition into progress or risk falling into the doldrums of debt and a destruction of all that they and three generations of ancestors have worked hard to build up? Should they keep the farm?

Much of the story exemplifies themes that have become mainstay issues in our current society and indicate deeper problems with our cultural folkways. By implication these problems run deep even to encompassing the way we have accepted a lifestyle manipulated by corporations, industrial farming practices, and the fast food and processed food industries.

Never brow beating us, Pedersen touches upon these ideas cleverly in whispers of truth that float like gossamer in the conversations of the family as they complete their various chores. For example, mom, Paula Price (a wonderful Amy Griffin), enjoys bragging about her recipe using the orchard’s delectable, fresh peaches, and subsequently there are follow up comments about the bland, no taste peaches in grocery stores that have been picked green to ripen in a truck. Of course, this lust for fruit and vegetables out of season, over the years has escalated to a negative chain of events from increasing our carbon footprint in food production, transportation costs, and pollution, to all the woes concentrated around agri-business and its lobbyists fighting against GMO labeling, use of pesticides and herbicides, etc.  In the consumer desire for variety has come a lack of quality, nutrition and taste with the attendant environmental impact. Though all of this is unspoken by the characters because they cannot know the future, we do; we are living it and we understand how that folkway has perpetuated a negative result. Pedersen is subtle, but if one has eyes to see, the message is clear in what we are “planting” for our children.

Another example  of threading themes occurs when father Adam (a dynamic Josh Powell) discusses how watermelons and peaches have to be made to please consumers. Watermelons must have few or no seeds-no one likes the seeds, and peaches must have “no fuzz.”  With these concepts Pedersen gently infers that in food production, the natural world has been modified to our liking. Ultimately, agri-business and industrial food production have accommodated suburbanites and mallsters, but at what expense to our own health, and to the health of the environment?

Though farmers dealt with these questions decades ago, recently we have begun to see the error of our ways. In a line that runs deep, Adam Price asks, “What comes of a nation that doesn’t want peach fuzz?”  Pedersen has beautifully revealed that all elements of a society are networked together starting with the land and how food is produced. Inherent is a love of the land and its spiritual value which those who have worked on it for generations truly comprehend and venerate. When the land, its creatures, and natural crops are mowed down, tweaked, disdained, and not properly respected, then what indeed are we creating for ourselves and our posterity?

The production design, staging, and the acting reflect a craft and ingenuity that is enhanced by the music and dialogue with energetic vitality. Through the director’s clever use of an economy of space, the actors brilliantly create the lives of their characters with fitting props that are incorporated into the musical numbers. The talented actors (Jenny Rose Baker, Matt Farcher, Daniel Rowan, Trevor St. John-Gilbert, Josh Powell and Amy Griffin), and their singing are spot on, exceptional. Theirs is a liveliness and enthusiasm not often found in musical productions where sometimes the direction pales, the actors tend to “park and bark,” and where there doesn’t appear to be much inner life or conflict. It is thanks to Ludovica Villar-Hauser’s thoughtful and attentive direction, the actors’ portrayals, and Pedersen’s succinct book that the storyline never becomes bogged down in the maudlin.

This is a production which should find additional venues because of its salient themes and overriding message about our accountability to ourselves and others in our culture, in what we allow, often mindlessly and with a lack of vision. The beauty of this production is that Pedersen’s message always remains hopeful and does not hit the audience over the head with cant and/or the rhetoric that we should “eat organic” and “buy local.” She achieves this with simplicity by telling the story of the Price family and how they are forced into an untenable position with their beloved farm because of a combination of factors: some ill, some good. We are left with questions: Should this be? Doesn’t this impact all of us in the long term?

The title says it all: “This Will All be Yours.” The message gives us pause for indeed, what are we leaving for our grandchildren if we continue our current actions and policies? Hopefully, we are creating innovative ways to keep the best of what our forebears gave us, jettisoning all that is unfruitful and, most importantly, recognizing the difference.

This Will All be Yours runs until August 7th.