One man's Wine Country success story
Play focuses on tipping point in Gundlach Bundschu's history
"I'm the midwife," Ford jokes.
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David Ford |
The show premiered at The Marsh in May before embarking on a 10-city tour that included stops in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. The tour comes to Wine Country on Sunday for a fund-raiser performance in Sonoma, celebrating the winery's 150th anniversary.
Rather than try to fit six generations' worth of history into less than a hour, the show focuses on Towle Bundschu, who guided the family business through decades following the Prohibition era by planting pear trees and tomatoes and raising cattle and sheep.
"My immediate inclination was to focus on Towle," Ford said. "The family was surprised by that choice, but ultimately delighted. Usually, the focus tends to go to the old glory days, and the new glory days, yet what I was looking for as a dramatist was the moment when everything hung in the balance."
Discouraged and ready to sell the family's land, Towle had to decide in the late '60s whether to let his son Jim restart the winery.
"It's a wonderful father-and-son story," said Stephanie Weissman, founder and artistic director of The Marsh.
When Gundlach Bundschu commissioned the theater to create a play, Weissman immediately enlisted Ford, who has worked at The Marsh since its inception nearly 20 years ago.
During his tenure there, Ford, 52, has become one of the country's leaders in solo performance, even though he always has stayed backstage. Ford received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Yale in 1978, then studied drama in France, originally intending to become a designer. During his 20s, he took jobs as a stagehand at San Francisco Opera and the American Conservatory Theater.
"Instead of going to graduate school, I worked in theaters," Ford said.
He has collaborated at The Marsh with a long list of author-actors, including Marga Gomez and Josh Kornbluth, with impressive results. Ford has helped create such successful shows as Charlie Varon's "Rush Limbaugh in Night School" and Brian Copeland's long-running "Not a Genuine Black Man." As a director, Ford specializes in coaching solo performers as they write and rehearse stories from their own lives.
"David Ford is able to look at each person's story and make it the biggest it can be," Weissman said. "He's incredibly gifted at getting people to see their own potential, but then he stays out of it. He never lets his own ego get in the way."
Ford contends his work has become progressively harder to describe, even as he became more accomplished at it.
"I tend to be able to help people figure out their own stories, and find the emotional contact points," he said. "I'm a stand-in for the audience."
For "Towle's Hill," Weissman and Ford recruited Mark Kenward, who had worked with them on several previous projects at The Marsh.
"We didn't know it, but Mark looks like the Bundschu family, so that really worked out," she said with a laugh.
Following Sunday's performance in Sonoma, "Towle's Hill" will return to The Marsh for weekly Friday-night performances through October and most of November.
Both Weissman and Ford credit the Bundschu family, and particularly current winery president Jeff Bundschu, for giving the theater company a free hand, candid interviews and full support.
"Jeff Bundschu did what management is supposed to do, but seldom actually does," Ford said. "And that's hire people you trust, and let them do their jobs."