Today through Saturday, actors will present first-person accounts of five of the greatest historical figures of the 1920s at Ohio Chautauqua 2005.
Ohio Chautauqua is a free festival offered collaboratively by the Ohio Humanities Council and the OSU Humanities Institute, said Rick Livingston, associate director of the Humanities Institute.
The presenters will portray five historically significant individuals from the theme chosen for the year, said Fran Tiburzio, spokeswoman for the Ohio Humanities Council. This year’s theme is the Roaring ’20s, she said.
Each character will be portrayed for one night of the five. The presenters will give monologues about the characters’ lives and important events, Tiburzio said.
After the presentations, audience members will be given the opportunity to ask the characters questions about their lives and experiences, she said.
Once the questions for the characters are complete, the audience is invited to pose questions to the presenter. Once the actor has broken character, the audience is provided the opportunity to find out things that the actual character might not have known or wanted to tell, said Gene Worthington, who is portraying Babe Ruth this year.
The presenters are chosen from a nationwide search that seeks actors with the most knowledge of the character for which they are applying, Tiburzio said.
“Baseball has been a lifetime interest to me,” said Worthington, an administrator in the county school system of West Virginia.
In order to receive the position of the character, the presenters must audition and write a paper on their knowledge, Worthington said.
“I knew a great deal about Babe before, but a lot of it was myth,” Worthington said. “But as I did research I found that there was some truth to each of them.”
Worthington said he began doing detailed research nearly a year before the festivals began.
“Ohio Chautauqua gives a three-dimensional view of the characters and a first-hand opportunity to ask questions you might be interested in and did not ever learn in your history book,” Worthington said.
The nightly historical portrayals will be held on the north lawn of the Drake Union at 7:30 p.m. and will be preceded by music at 6:45 p.m., Tiburzio said.
The historical characters that will be presented are: Henry Ford, Zelda Fitzgerald, John Dillinger, Zora Neale Hurston and Ruth.
The other portion of the festival is the daytime workshops, said Andrea Slesinski, a spokeswoman for OSU.
“These workshops are trying to incorporate the lives of the people being portrayed with the events of the era,” Slesinski said.
The workshops each have a different theme and will collectively teach the history of the era and the surroundings of the characters and their storytelling techniques.
Most of the workshops are for young people, but two adult workshops will be offered at the Worthington Griswold Center for senior citizens.
The Ohio Chautauqua festival is held in five cities throughout Ohio during different weeks of the year, with Columbus being the last, Tiburzio said.
The Columbus program will be held at two OSU locations and several others throughout the Columbus area, Slesinski said.
The Humanities Institute has collaborated with the Ohio Humanities Institute on this program for six years and hopes to eventually reach all branches of the university, Livingston said.
The program has been at OSU’s Mansfield and Lima branches; this is its second time on main campus, Livingston said.
