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At age 13, Mary Tuomanen celebrated Christmas with her family. At age 30, she seeks the truth about Hanukkah by playing a 13-year-old girl onstage at Old City’s Painted Bride Art Center.
“I grew up in a Christian household,” Tuomanen, of Tasker and Bancroft streets, said. “I’d been more interested in Judaism recently because I also was in a play [with] the Lantern [Theater Co.] called ‘New Jerusalem.’” That was a really great primer for the play I’m in now since I’m playing someone coming to terms with their Judaism.”
Tuomanen plays Rachel in Gas & Electric Arts’ “Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins,” an original production playing through Dec. 30. Rachel, who recently lost her father, time travels from 2011 to explore her faith during 19th-century Russian pogroms with Hershel as a guide.
“We had the book in front of us and then basically it was improvisations,” Tuomanen said of the children’s story of the same name that the work is based on. “… each time we’d settle into some scene and then the playwright Jackie Goldfinger would take it all home and take all the best lines and add some better lines and come back with a final scene.”
The script, which was written in this manner over several months, was finalized a few weeks ago, leading up to the first dress rehearsal that took place Saturday night.
“[It was the] first time with all the music, which is basically another character in the script. It’s amazing. Gregg Mervine composed the music specifically for the piece. It’s klezmer and it’s dark and rich and gorgeous. It shows the journey of the story.”
The inclusion of the character of Rachel is an addition to the original story by Eric Kimmel. Together, Rachel and Hershel outwit the town goblins, who are preventing the villagers from celebrating Hanukkah. Rachel also is battling her own demons, with the passing of her father.
“I’m a [13]-year-old girl so we sort of had to go back to our [13]-year-old selves and remember how important our emotions felt and how we began to define our personalities, what you like and what you don’t, how your opinions might be different from your parents and how that struggle begins at that age,” she said.
Tuomanen has been taking on a string of challenging roles, including a recent turn with Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre as Hamlet. Ironically, this helped her get into the character of Rachel.
“The process was bizarrely similar. Hamlet is also pretty adolescent. It’s that feeling of betrayal when you realize your parents are fallible and they are not there to serve your own desire and needs,” Tuomanen said. “That seems to also be present in the character of Rachel.”
Tuomanen made her way to Philadelphia by way of Massachusetts. After boarding school in New Hampshire, she attended Ohio’s Kenyon College where she studied theater and playwriting.
“Bizarrely, acting was definitely not what I thought I’d be doing,” she said. “I had done acting at Kenyon, but the school is really geared toward writing. I knew it would be a hard life. I never expected to make a living at it.”
Upon graduation, Tuomanen was drawn to Kentucky where she had secured a job with the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville.
“It was a young company and once you finish there, they take you to do a showcase in New York so a lot of people were fed into New York City afterward,” Tuomanen said. “I was only in New York for a short time. I didn’t like New York. It was the actor’s life like I didn’t want to have, which was scrounging for money, living paycheck to paycheck.”
As Tuomanen grappled with her next move, she remembered exercises in physical theater that had piqued her interest, so she went to Paris to study at Ecole Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq.
“I was there for two-and-a-half years. It’s a two-year program. The first year is 99 students and then the second year they cut it down to 20-odd students. It’s a very competitive program,” Tuomanen said. “It’s hard because the French pedagogue is so different. It’s a lot more harsh than nurturing and loving. But I really do feel I got a lot out of the school. And I’m really happy that I have this peculiar set of skills that I can bring to he table in Philadelphia.”
And bring it she does in “Hershel,” as well as other works such as “Between Trains,” which is what led her to be cast as Rachel, and in “A Paper Garden,” a Fringe piece she and collaborators staged at a warehouse at 21st Street and Washington Avenue.
“We took over the upstairs floor and set up a machine shop installation, a whole universe there that people could walk around in,” Tuomanen said. “It had high ceilings because one character was on stilts the whole show and it ended up being a really interesting space to work with so other companies have worked there after us.
“That’s the great thing about Philly and the Philly Fringe. You discover spaces that you wouldn’t normally go to, especially when you are a company with peculiar needs.”
Tuomanen is now settled in Newbold, across the street from her collaborator, Aaron Cromie. Next up for the versatile actress is “Vainglorious,” where she will be taking on the role of Napoleon in a ‘promenade’-style piece that has the audience standing and moving through the work.
Until the end of the month, however, Tuomanen will continue to take the stage as Rachel and she encourages theatergoers to experience the same journey.
“’Hershel’ is a show with so much joy in it, it’s very wise and funny — funny for both adults and children,” she said. “It’s just a huge celebration and I think to feel a lot of the joy, and the rich sense of it, it takes into account a lot about grief and pain, and as a result is able to be as funny and as rich as it is.” SPR
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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