Though other obligations prevented me from catching most of the Fertile Ground Festival, which has offered such a variety of new works to local audiences this month, I did manage to catch the world premiere production of Who’s Who before it closed. 

The play was produced by Rogue Pack, which offers young people opportunities to experience the embodied creativity of theatrical expression. Rogue Pack was a natural home for this play about youthful awakening and connection across generations.

Who’s Who was inspired by playwright Marshall Welch’s actual experience finding a left-behind note in a library volume of Who’s Who. You have to be of a certain age to even know what such a volume is — it’s an old-school resource little known to young people in today’s digital world where Google tells you what you want to know about who is important. 

Welch’s experience sparked into an intriguing tale of a girl, Onnie, who, while performing community service in a local library, finds a sort of personal diary deliberately left in a volume of Who’s Who by another girl, Mitsy, some 70 years earlier. Onnie becomes intrigued by Mitsy’s story and, for possibly the first time, finds a reason to pull away from the chronic distraction of her cellphone to discover what happened to Mitsy.

It’s an inventive setting for exploring how a bond might be formed between young people across decades of time. In Welch’s imagining, a girl in the 1940s who had no one to whom she could confide her story (which includes some sexual trauma) might find solidarity with a girl in the future who can relate to her experience. And the breadcrumbs Mitsy leaves behind in the 1940s might point Onnie toward engaging the world in ways that open points of connection.

The cast spans generations beyond what we typically get the opportunity to see on stage together. Vega Star invests heart in her portrayal of Onnie, balanced with believable amounts of skittishness and snark. And the two actresses playing Mitsy are standouts in the cast: Maryellen Wood imbues the young Mitsy with genuineness and vulnerability, and Cynthia Schwell as elderly Mitsy sustains a very believable throughline between herself and young Mitsy. The play does a good job of showing rather than telling, in a few well-constructed interactions, how just quietly surviving can become heroism that would be easy to miss. 

It’s a play with some good bone structure, offered with sincerity and heart. There is plenty to build on here.

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