Jeffrey Folmer, executive director of Ventfort Hall Mansion & Gilded Age Museum, can articulate the museum’s mission succinctly.
"My mantra is to teach people about the Gilded Age in fun, engaging and exciting ways," Folmer said. But what people forget, Folmer added, is that teaching about the Gilded Age does not have to be accomplished solely by touring the restored home of the Morgan family.
"It’s important to me that people realize we are half about the historic mansion Š and half a straight-out performance venue," he said. That’s why this year’s summer show, "Revels and Revelations," was such a perfect fit.
This ninth summer of intimate shows features the life of Belle da Costa Greene, something Folmer could not be more thrilled about because the play offers a direct connection to Ventfort Hall. The home was built in 1893 by Sarah Morgan, sister to financier J.P. Morgan. Sarah and her husband, George, had a son named Junius.
"He (Junius) interested his Uncle J.P. into getting this collection of rare books and illuminated manuscripts," Folmer explained.
Junius, Folmer said, discovered this young woman named Belle da Costa Greene working at the Princeton University library. He introduced her to J.P., and the rest is history. She became the librarian of Morgan’s private library, cataloging his acquisitions, and later, after his death, the first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, located in midtown Manhattan.
Greene’s story was unearthed when Juliane Hiam was asked to write another play for this summer, following on the heels of her wildly successful "Paris 1890 -- Unlaced!" last year. But because the museum is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, she said, it was very important that she be able to relate the character in the play to the Morgans.
"They sent me away with this very thick bio of the Morgans Š and there was this little chapter about Belle, and I said, ‘This is it. This is the woman,’" Hiam said.
Besides her career as an expert in illuminated manuscripts and her bargaining power with dealers, both of which made her a very powerful, influential and interesting woman in her own right, Greene appealed to Hiam for a very different reason: her secret identity.
"She had lived her life telling everyone she was Portuguese-Dutch," Hiam said.
Greene was in fact African-American, the daughter of Richard Theodore Greener, a lawyer as well as the first African-American to graduate from Harvard and a dean at Howard University School of Law. After Greener abandoned his family, Greene’s mother, Genevieve, decided that she and her daughters were light-skinned enough to "pass" for other than African-American, and so she changed her name, and they changed theirs, disassociating them from their betrayer.
"This was in the early 1900s, and it was very common for African-Americans who were light-skinned to ‘pass’ in order to get better jobs, better opportunities," Hiam said.
But this also meant Greene had turned her back on her heritage. The concept was a struggle at first for Andi Bohs, the light-skinned African-American chosen to play Greene in this hour-long drama.
"At first it was difficult for me to step into the shoes of someone who decided to disinherit her entire history," Bohs said.
But Bohs, like Hiam, read a lot of material in preparation for this show, including "One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life -- A Story of Race and Family Secrets" by Bliss Broyard, in which Broyard reveals her journey after she learns in 1990, upon her father’s death, that he was in fact half African-American.
In the book, Bohs said, Broyard says that everyone has one or two people who have turned their backs on their family in order to pass. "Pffft. ‘Not mine!’ I said," exclaimed Bohs, with a dismissive wave of her hand. But the book prompted Bohs to have a conversation with her mother that would reveal their own family secret.
Her mother explained that while living in Nebraska, Bohs’ own great-grandfather’s brother had decided to leave the family in order to pass. "He told the family not to contact him again," she said. "I am now more understanding of the choices she made and why."
But Hiam explained that the show, which does focus on Greene’s accomplishments, is not just about her secret and her career. Greene was also a sensual, bohemian type who engaged in several long affairs before her death in her 60s in 1950.
Set in the moments before Greene’s death, the play, which also reveals Morgan as a man with normal worries and anxieties, allows Bohs to reveal all Hiam’s imagined parts of Greene: her worship of Morgan and of "ink on paper," her joy and satisfaction in her accomplishments and life in which she moved in the most elite of circles, her dedication to maintaining the mystery of her early life.
Hiam and Bohs do not claim the play to be historically accurate. It is almost impossible for it to be so, as Greene burned all her personal papers shortly before her death, Hiam said. Greene even told people, Hiam said, that she didn’t want any biographies written about her after her death.
"She was very proud of her accomplishments, but didn’t want her personal story to be told Š oops!" said Hiam as she and Bohs broke out in light laughter.
But Hiam did take the task of unveiling Belle da Costa Greene to the world very seriously.
"I would hope she felt it honored her, somehow," Hiam said.
And as for Bohs, she too has approached this sensitive subject with consciousness and grace.
"It made me look at race and society in a different way than I did before," she said.
"Revels and Revelations" plays at Ventfort Hall, 104 Walker St., Lenox, on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays at 7:30 p.m., Saturdays at 4 p.m. and Sundays at 10 a.m. through Sept. 5. There is no show July 29. Tickets are $25 for adults and $7 for children 5 and up. "Picnics on the Porch," usually offered at lunchtime, are now also available before the evening performances and after the Sunday show for $10. Info: 413-637-3206 or gildedage.org.
