What Connects and Divides Us?

What brings us together and what separates us? How do people from different races and ethnicities experience and transcend the pain and isolation of prejudice?

These are some of the powerful questions posed in "Chestina Vanessa Poulson," a new production by Emerson Theatre Collaborative (ETC) opening May 7 in Noank. The play is about the Ehrenwalds, a post-Holocaust Jewish immigrant family, and Chestina, an African-American woman in a segregated town in a remote corner of Virginia who discover they have a lot more in common than they would have ever imagined.

Poet and playwright Melanie Greenhouse, a Noank resident, wrote the play, a memoir based on her life with Chessie (Chestina), who came to work for her family in the 1950s and who continues to be a strong presence in her life.

Greenhouse belongs to the Writer's Round Table, a group of Connecticut playwrights whose works have earned fame and notoriety. From 1994 to 2004 she coordinated the Arts Café-Mystic, an award-winning music and literary series, and in 2003 the Connecticut Commission on the Arts named Greenhouse a "Distinguished Advocate of the Arts."

The play stars ETC's president and founder Camilla Ross of Colchester as Chessie. Zoe Hartman of Stonington plays Melanie. The Greek chorus and assorted characters are played by Patricia Riddick of Mystic; Sandra Walker and Aziza Clayton of Ledyard; Christopher Lee Williams of Norwich; and Krystal Livingston of New London.

Andrea Adresakis of New York City, who has many acting, dancing, and directing credits to her name - most notably she appeared in the film and TV series "Fame" and directed Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" - directs the production. This is her directorial debut with ETC. Joshua Lee Ramos of Hartford is the assistant director. This is his fourth show with ETC.

Adresakis says several things appealed to her about this play.

"I was in the Director's Lab studying the Greek chorus and learning what it entailed in terms of dance and music," she says. "I saw that this play had a Greek chorus and was excited about that aspect of it. An interesting thing, which might be a little controversial, is that when the Greek chorus doubles as a gospel choir and is playing characters that are white, they wear white masks."

Adresakis also points out that the play takes place during a period of history prior to the civil rights movement.

"Having grown up in the '60s, the juxtaposition of black and Jewish cultures at that time in history was also interesting to me," she says.

Greenhouse says she always wanted to write about her family's story and initially tried to do it as a novel. While teaching the persona poem technique to inner city kids at the Writer's Block in New London, she found a compelling way to tell her story.

"They were putting together a production about Hurricane Katrina victims, trying to imagine the disaster from the points of view of those who were displaced," she says. "I decided to try that same technique with my family's story, writing it from Chessie's point of view."

She wrote a number of poems, which eventually morphed into a two-act play.

"I realized I'd finally found the right voice," Greenhouse says. "Chessie is the narrator, observing this family. You hear her cadence, her expressions, a lot of which are religiously based, and are just beautiful."

The Real Story

Greenhouse explains that her parents ended up in the small segregated Virginia town where she was born because her father, who had been in the lumber business in Bratislava "until the Nazis took it over and robbed him of his livelihood," decided to establish a new business in the forest-rich eastern shore of Virginia.

"When I was 2 years old, my mother needed help with the housekeeping. She wanted a life outside the domestic sphere," Greenhouse says.

Greenhouse's father hired Chessie, the daughter of one of the men on his crew, who was looking for work.

"We just hit it off, took to each other, were buddies from the start-the way Chessie describes it," Greenhouse says. "She fell in love with this little girl and that became her source of income."

"She lived in a very segregated part of the community," Greenhouse continues. "Looking back, it was almost like apartheid. She had her own child, who her family had to look after while she was working. She was the oldest of 12. She came to work for a Jewish family with one little girl. There were more differences than similarities. The similarity was that we were both minorities living in a segregated world."

Greenhouse says she wrote the play in 2005-06, during a period when her personal life was in upheaval.

"I needed to return to a time when there was relative stability in my life and a nurturer who was Chessie," she says. "The act of writing the play became my lifeboat."