Ellouise Schoettler is an enthusiast of genealogy. My Diamond Jubilee is her first public performance telling her autobiographical story of Finding Gus. Based on how the performance is staged, it is easy to imagine that before she only told the story in the comfort of her home.
Ellouise, a bright-eyed woman, greeted each audience member as if they had just entered her warmly cushioned living room. What soon unfolds is Ellouises’s journey of a new found love for her family history.
Ellouise sits in a comfortable chair beside a small table on which rests two portraits, one of her grandfather, Gus Keasler, and the other her grandmother, Ellie Hall Keasler Baer. Though we soon learn that the catalyst for the story is the relationship formed between Ellouises’s grandparents, the tale itself is less a love story and more a story of family. As Ellouise points to the portrait beside her, we are drawn down a timeline starting in 1912 when Gus Keasler and Ellie Hall Keasler Baer first meet.
With sheer excitement, Ellouise shifts into drive detailing the fine moments that have led her to be where she is today. She hits each word carefully giving them full attention. She is, after all, a 75 year-old storyteller and this detail is not lost through the hour. She recounts the experience of meeting different family members from her father’s side for the first time. As we are introduced to them it becomes clear that she does not switch characters but remains the same Ellouise from start to finish. The effect is that we experience the story from her own perspective and through this feel her individual reactions to the events that take place.
The downside is that we do not get a fuller perspective of the people wo come to define her. Their character is only felt by Ellouise’s reaction, which is one of consistent joy. Though we hear the names of Ellouise’s mother, grandmother, grandfather and niece, we come to know Ellouise the best.
Ellouise has learned a tremendous about herself through her family history and this is evident in her testament to tell stories of them. Though young to the world of genealogy, starting only when she was 50 years old, she is evermore impressionable. Also, a self-starter in the age of blogs, Ellouise is a firm proponent of Twitter and Facebook, and utilizes both to share her stories with the world. And this is not her first appearance at Capital Fringe. She was here last year with another chapter from her life, Pushing Boundaries.
My Diamond Jubilee is a one-woman performance that intersects genealogy with rich storytelling. Perfect for those who have an appreciation for family history and genealogy. We as audience members are given a window into Ellouises’s family history that ultimately leaves us curious about our own individual history. Finding the names and dates are only the beginning of discovering the breadth of family stories, we learn.
It is a heart-warming sojourn that leaves one filled with appreciation for the individual discovery that can be born through family ties.
My Diamond Jubilee has 3 more performances at the Goethe Institute – Main Stage, 812 7th Street, NW, Washington, DC.
Tickets
Out of a possible top rating of 5, Breena rates this a 3.
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My husband and I had the pleasure of hearing Ellouise Schoettler tell the story of finding her grandfather, who died before she was born, through the magic of genealogical research and an open and willing heart. I found myself in tears more than once during her performance. Ellouise welcomes you warmly into her story. as surely as if she had offered you a glass of lemonade and a comfortable seat in her front parlor. I wept for her grandmother who lost the love of her life much too early. I wept for her mother who rode her tricycle gleefully proclaiming that she finally had a daddy. I wept at the tenderness of her meeting with relatives formerly unknown. But most of all, I cheered for Ellouise – a woman who had the courage to search for Gus and to share him with us all. Please see this show.
I had the pleasure of watching Ellouise craft this story over several years, as she wrote bits and pieces on her blog or shared new information in conversations and on Facebook. She is a seasoned researcher, one who leaves no stone (or gravestone) unturned in her quest to know all she can about her story. I will not be able to see this show, but I know those who do will be gifted by this gracious and talented lady with a story they will not son forget.
Breena Siegel hits the nail on the head when she says, “Finding the names and dates are only the beginning of discovering the breadth of family stories.” I know for me genealogy suggests dates and charts, something abstract. But Ellouise Schoettler’s true story is like a detective novel, but one that brings you back not to a crime but to real lives of joy and pain that, unbeknownst to her, were reverberating in her own life three generations later. It’s like Faulkner says, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But it can be hidden. It’s the connections that her search leads to – as when a woman first meets her dead brother’s granddaughter so many decades later and gets to bring him alive again for both of them – and it’s a real connection, not one in theory – that’s when the audience is moved to tears. See this.
Ellouise Schoettler’s performance “Finding Gus,” her Diamond Jubliee, left me in tears. A fine storyteller with the drive to research and learn, learn, learn, Ellouise brought her family to life so you left the theatre missing them and wanting to know even more. Powerfully told, leaving image after image, marble angels, Gus playing wildly dangerous early century football with fierceness and strength, Louie, unafraid of dying because she is going to meet her Dad for the first time in her memory, the relation who tells Ellouise, “We share the same blood.” All of these are now fierce memories that had me crying and today, writing down my husband’s boyhood memories. As a professional storyteller since 1982 and now a writer of creative non-fiction, I have a deep appreciation of the amount of material Ellouise was sculpting into a performance. Well done. Bravo. And by the way, I am sending all of my writing class down to see Ellouise. I want them to see how it is done.