The Widow Jane Mine has walls, a history, and acoustics that Frank Marquette considers sufficient stagecraft. “We don’t need props, we don’t need backdrops,” he says. “It’s actually part of the show.” For three nights in October, the Rosendale mine will host Theatre on the Road’s “Ghost Stories of the Hudson Valley,” a family-friendly trip through several centuries of local history, with a few spirits along for the ride.
Marquette plays the Night Watchman, a visitor from the 18th century who guides the audience from the era before Dutch settlement through the industrial growth of the 19th century. Four historical characters appear along the way: Governor George Clinton; Julia Dillon, a Kingston artist who also ran an ironworks; Thomas Cornell, whose businesses helped shape the region’s shipping, railroads, and resorts; and Mama Nuchwe, an Esopus woman whose story is presented through a 19th-century schoolteacher.
Marquette describes the show as “historical with a touch of the spooky.” Between the characters’ appearances, the Night Watchman recounts tales associated with Huguenot Street, the former Ulster County Jail, Bannerman Island, and the Widow Jane Mine itself. He also makes room for the Hudson Valley’s gnomes, including one said to have taken up residence in the Old Dutch Church steeple in Kingston. Local history has its stranger tenants.
Dillon’s story reached Marquette through that church. During the nine years he staged cemetery tours there, he noticed paintings overlooking the sanctuary. A pastor identified their maker as Dillon, whose work led Marquette to another part of her life: After her husband died, she took charge of a foundry on the Rondout in an era when few women held such positions. “She represents not only women, but she represents industry,” he says, “and she also represents Hudson Valley art.”
The range of characters reflects a change in Theatre on the Road’s historical work. Its early presentations centered on Revolutionary War figures and the men who built the region’s industries. Conversations with local historians prompted Marquette to look more closely at women and Indigenous people whose roles he had never learned about in school. He says that research led him to Mama Nuchwe and accounts of her involvement in relations between the Esopus people and Dutch settlers.
Marquette has been turning history into theater for more than a decade, though the company grew out of a different kind of entertainment. He and his wife and producing partner, Kristen, founded the murder-mystery company Murder Cafe in Las Vegas in 1998. They brought it to the Hudson Valley 17 years ago. When his interest in local history developed into lectures and living-history performances, Marquette created Theatre on the Road as a separate home for that work. Its productions have since appeared in libraries, cemeteries, and historic sites; the troupe also staged “Dracula” on Bannerman Island for six years.
Ghost stories, Marquette has found, make an effective invitation into the past. Ask an audience about an apparition and soon someone wants to know who lived in the building, what happened there, and what remains. He invites that curiosity into the performance: The actors will ask for suggestions and local knowledge, and audience members can join in or simply listen. “I always learn something from them,” he says.
“Ghost Stories of the Hudson Valley” runs October 2–4 at 7pm at the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale. Chairs are provided. Tickets are $20 through the Century House Historical Society.
