After almost a decade apart, some of the cast and crew of Headwaters recently reunited for two sold-out performances. The popular community production ran seven consecutive seasons at the Sautee Nacoochee Cultural Center from 2007 to 2013.
Weaving together music, storytelling, and humor, the play celebrates the twelve rivers that begin in Northeast Georgia and the generations of people who have called these mountains home.
Producer/Director Lisa Mount first conceived of Headwaters two decades ago. Through her artistic partnership with American playwright and poet Jo Carson, Mount witnessed the creation of many community story performances throughout the United States.
“When I moved to Sautee Nacoochee in 1999, I began to think we could do a community story performance because every time you ask a question here, you get a story in response,” she explains.
At the time, the Sautee Nacoochee Center was looking for new programming ideas. A ‘story play’ began to take root.
“Starting in 2004, we gathered stories, crafted them into scripts, and local folks volunteered their time to perform them,” says Tommy Deadwyler who was arts program director for the Sautee Nacoochee Community Association at the time.
Deadwyler and Mount produced the plays along with Terri Edgar. They brought in professional artists from around the country to write, direct, choreograph and design the shows. They worked alongside local artists who led the project from start to finish. Their collaborative efforts produced three major scripts and one best of show:
Headwaters: Stories From A Goodly Portion of Northeast Georgia, 2007 and 2008
Headwaters: Birth, Death and Places In-Between, 2009 and 2010
Headwaters: A Goodly Portion of our Songs and Stories, 2011
Headwaters: Didja Hear?, 2012 and 2013
Reunion
For the reunion concerts, Mount and co-producer M.K. Wegmann reassembled more than three dozen former cast members, musicians, writers, designers, and managers. Some traveled from other states to participate.
“Once we began to get interest from people who had to come from far away – Colorado, Virginia, Kentucky – I believed it could happen,” Mount says.
Following a year of virtual isolation, the creative team wanted to seize the opportunity to reconnect to the sense of community that binds this region together. With a fully vaccinated cast and crew, the producers were able to accomplish that.
On July 17 and 18, 2021, the Headwaters cast stepped back in time as they stepped back on stage at the historic gymnasium on the campus of the Sautee Nacoochee Cultural Center near Helen.
“We were able to put together a beautiful, heartfelt, powerful show in one week because we spent seven years together making gorgeous music and saying profound words,” Mount tells Now Habersham.
“It was such a joy to be home and see folks that had participated through the years,” adds Deadwyler. “Participation in Headwaters built lifelong friends among cast and crew.”
Clarkesville’s Lane Gresham knows about those sustained friendships. She and her daughter Perry appeared in Headwaters in 2009 and 2010. They spent ten weeks each summer rehearsing in the historic gym. Gresham also served as the unofficial photographer for the project from 2009-2013. Her daughter picked up that duty this year, capturing many of the memorable moments the reunited cast shared.
“To reunite for the reunion concert was a life-affirming experience for me,” says Gresham. “There’s nothing quite like being a part of a collaborative storytelling production.”
Asked to share her reunion highlight, Mount chooses two. The first was Lisa Deaton singing a song by Jeff Mosier that begins, “hard times make the good times mean more as time goes on.” The message was timely and poignant in light of the year that has been.
The second was Ebony Jordan performing a story about the desegregation of Northeast Georgia schools.
In the 60s, Dr. J.R. Rosser was the only principal in the Habersham County school system who had a doctorate in education, but he was a Black man in the segregated South. When Georgia finally complied with Brown v. Board of Education in 1966 (ten years late), Rosser was given an impossible choice. “He had the dignity to find a way through,” says Mount, “and Ebony, who is a granddaughter of the Bean Creek community here in Sautee, hit that moment out of the park.”
Jordan’s performance moved the audience to tears.
“We told powerful stories about important events in our local history, events that still have meaning today,” says Mount.
Revival?
Not only do those stories still have meaning, but they also still have an audience. After two sold-out performances, Sautee Nacoocheee Community Association’s Marketing and Development Coordinator Jennie Inglis thanked the community for its “enthusiastic and generous response” to the shows. She praised the Headwaters cast and crew for creating performances “that stirred up both laughter and tears.”
With so much interest in the reunion, one wonders why SNCA, which maintains the Cultural Center, stopped producing the show. After all, during its seven-year run, it became a tourist destination attracting local, regional, and even international interest.
The shows ran for three weeks each summer (one week in 2011). Each was a mix of stories, music, movement, spectacle, puppetry, and video projections. According to Deadwyler, during its seven-year run, Headwaters engaged more than 275 volunteers and brought in over $350,000 in grants, contributions, and ticket sales.
“We sold over 8,000 tickets during its production,” he says. “After 10 years of working on the productions, we felt it was time to pursue other projects.”
“We wanted to make space for new things, new performances, new ideas,” adds Mount. “And the primary playwright, Jo Carson, died from colon cancer in 2011.”
In 2013, the Headwaters series finished with a text of Carson’s writing and new scenes written by local writer Jerry Grillo and nationally recognized writer and director Gerard Stropnicky (aka the Jerrys).
Mount concludes, “All good things come to an end; it’s the bad things that go on forever.”
That may be true of some things, but not good memories: For the fortunate artists who are part of the Headwaters family, those are forever.
“The entire Headwaters team is incredibly talented and generous. I’ll be forever grateful to Lisa Mount and Jerry Grillo for welcoming me into the group all those years ago,” says Gresham. “The stories of this place resonate with so many; it was truly magical to return to the stage this summer.”
“This was a tremendously life-affirming event after we have been through a time of dying,” adds Mount. “We welcomed people as they were – a few pounds heavier, a few years older, a lot more out of the closet, bringing their children, more deeply connected to what matters – and we made a sense of community that is a rare and wondrous thing.”
While SNCA has no current plans for another Headwaters reunion concert, the recent production and the community’s response to it could breathe new life into this once seasonal storytelling series.
“The desire to tell stories of this place to one another is very strong,” says Mounts when asked if there are plans to revive the play. “I wouldn’t call those plans yet. But there’s energy around an idea, so plans will be next.”
