Finding Tamsen's Song

FINDING TAMSEN’S SONG

I love roses. Yeah, partly because of my last name. But mostly because they are so lovely. From the florist’s roses in a vase, to the fully opened blossoms covering a trellis in a garden. The soft petals, the vivid colors, the intoxicating scent. Roses and flowers in general, make me happy. Inspire me. Thrill me. Flowers never make me think, only feel.

 But one of our leading characters, Tamsen Donner, was all about thinking. She was logical, analytical, practical; a schoolteacher with an interest in botany. She kept a journal while on the trail and she made notes of the wildflowers she saw along the way.

 We needed a song for Tamsen. A solo which would let us in on who she was, which would reveal the essence of her character. Tamsen would serve as a foil to James Reed, the leader of their group. She was disappointed with the decisions being made by Reed, and in an era when women weren’t expected to have opinions, Tamsen wasn’t afraid to voice her opinions clearly. In the scene right after Tamsen had been needling Reed about his poor choices, we wanted her to sing while her young daughter listened.

 I struggled with finding a lyric for her. My “way in” to characters is usually from their emotions. How does she feel? What does she desire? Yet I just couldn’t find an emotional side to Tamsen; she was all left-brain. In fact, I didn’t really “get” Tamsen’s interest in flowers – it seemed to conflict with her analytical, reasoning mind.

 Eric suggested that I was thinking of how I react to flowers, not how Tamsen reacts to them. Tamsen loves flowers, not because of their fragrance or brilliant colors, and not because their appearance makes her feel cheerful – that’s Margee’s love of flowers, not Tamsen’s. Tamsen loves flowers because of their predictability, of how what they will be and what they will do is programmed into every cell of their fiber. Flowers can be known.

 Once that idea clicked for me, I felt I knew Tamsen. I’d found my “way in.”

 It isn’t that Tamsen doesn’t have emotions (far from it!); it’s that she isn’t ruled by them. What Tamsen wants is to be able to understand people the way she can understand flowers. You know what a lupine will do, based on the scientific evidence in front of you. But despite all evidence... you can never predict what a person will do! They act illogically, they act based on fancy, based on emotion... and that's something Tamsen can't understand, it's not quantifiable. She wishes that people could eliminate that irrationality and – well, be like flowers.

 All of a sudden, the verse, the first two “A” sections of the song, and the “B,” came easily!

A PURPLE BLOSSOM STANDING TALL

IS ALL THAT YOU CAN SEE

IT BRIGHTENS A DUSTY WORLD

BUT SOMETHING ELSE IS CLEAR TO ME:

THERE IS BEAUTY IN THE LOGIC OF THE LUPINE

AN EXQUISITE SYSTEMATIC GRAND DESIGN

EVERY SEEDLING WILL FULFILL ITS BEST POTENTIAL

IT'S A FACT THAT'S SCIENTIFICALLY DIVINE!

IT'S PREDICTABLE, THE LOGIC OF THE LUPINE

FROM WHAT’S WRITTEN IN THE CODE OF EVERY CELL

AND EVALUATING ALL OF THE CONDITIONS

THERE’S AN OUTCOME YOU ASSUREDLY FORETELL

BUT OH! IT'S NOT THE SAME WITH PEOPLE

ALL LOGIC THEY DEFY

THEY WILL ACT ON WHIM AND EMOTION

WITHOUT GOOD REASON WHY

 But the third “A” was eluding me. In the first part of the song, Tamsen explains to her young daughter that what she loves about the beautiful wildflowers isn’t the physical beauty so much as it is the systematic way they live and grow to be beautiful. In the B section, Tamsen has expressed her wish that people were more like flowers. But … was that it? What was left to say?

 I asked myself why it mattered what Tamsen thought of lupines and other flowers. Why is it important to Tamsen and to the story we are telling? Why is it important to us, here and now in 2015 (when I was writing the song) or in 2017 (when it would be premiered), or in some year in the future (when it debuts on Broadway)…?

 For Tamsen, it was early summer on the plains of a great continent, but unbeknownst to her, in five months she and her family would be starving to death in the icy Sierra Nevada mountains.

 For me, it was November 2015. The day before I sat at my laptop struggling to find a lyric for the final lines of Tamsen’s song, ISIL terrorists had shattered the world with a series of coordinated attacks in Paris, leaving almost 100 random people dead.

 What could the science of a wildflower tell either of us that would have any relevance?

 And the answer came to me, as vivid as the memory of yellow daffodils peaking up from the frozen dirt every March when I was a little girl: the science of the flowers gives us hope:

 I FIND COMFORT IN THE LOGIC OF THE LUPINE

WITH A FLOWER I CAN KNOW WHAT IT WILL DO

WE’RE AFRAID OF THE UNKNOWN, UNCERTAIN FUTURE

BUT THE FLOWERS, EVERY SPRINGTIME, WILL RENEW

YES, THE FLOWERS, EVERY SPRINGTIME, WILL RENEW

Cut From The Show

CUT FROM THE SHOW 

When we decided to write a musical about the Donner Party, we chose the subject because we’d always been fascinated by the story of the pioneers, trapped in the icy mountains for the whole winter without food. We’d heard the story as school children, but as playwrights we had a lot of research to do, to learn all we could about the 87 people who were the Donner Party.

The more we read, the more we learned about each of them, and with each real person’s storyline, we found there was a wealth of more material, more STORY, than we could ever use. In a 2-act musical there isn’t enough time to tell the details of 87 stories, and some of our favorite people and incidents were eliminated from subsequent drafts of the show.  

One of the stories that was cut was the tale of Old Hardkoop.

Very little is known about Old Hardkoop other than he was a Belgian immigrant, single, older than most of the Company, and traveling with Keseberg’s family. In the historical narrative of the journey, which began in May, Hardkoop’s name doesn’t even come up until October 8.

The date is significant. Until October, the group had suffered great hardships – fording flooded rivers, a couple of deaths from natural causes, loss of much of their cattle and near-death experiences while crossing the Great Salt Desert. Those hardships had worn on the company’s spirts; they argued amongst themselves, they had lost valuable time, and they were anxious and afraid. But things got worse in October as anxiety and fear turned deadly. As they trudged across the landscape we now call Nevada, the heavy wagons were bogged down in the sand, slowing them down to a crawl. Item after item was thrown out of the wagon and abandoned. Tools, furniture, trunks of clothes:  anything that could be spared was tossed aside to make the wagons lighter.

On October 8, the Company stopped and made camp for the night, Old Hardkoop wasn’t with them. Keseberg was questioned about the old man, and he admitted he had turned Hardkoop out of the wagon to lighten the load. Hardkoop was made to walk on his own, to keep up as best he could. Two of the young teamsters reported seeing Old Hardkoop sitting beside the trail; his feet had given out and he had simply sat down to rest. In camp, Mr. Eddy and Mr. Elliot kept a fire going to serve as a beacon for the old man, but the old man never arrived.

The next morning, Eddy and Elliot begged to be given a horse to ride back on the trail to find Old Hardkoop, but no one would lend them a horse. The Company packed up and moved on, westward. The young men asked again at midday to borrow a horse and again they were told no. No time could be spared for hopeless rescue missions. Everyone was certain the old man must already be dead.

That’s it. That’s all we know of Old Hardkoop. Just a tiny footnote to an epic journey of 87 pioneers seeking a better life. Yet that tiny footnote fascinated me, and I tried to keep Old Hardkoop in our telling of the story. He made it into the First Draft of the show, and even had a little monologue, describing the scene from his point of view as he watched his companions disappear beyond the horizon. But then Rockwell & Rose became ruthless, as writers must, and we focused our storytelling by eliminating what was unnecessary. Old Hardkoop was left behind again, relegated to an archived .pdf file of a long-ago version of Meet Your Mountain.