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“DOLLS”
We were promised we’d see by the dawn’s early light,
But we woke up too early to see the sun rise
O’er the land of the free, in need of repair
And the home of the brave, where everyone’s scared
For those of you who grew up believing in Santa Claus, do you remember the moment when you learned he was a myth?
No fat dude chimney-shimmying, bringing gifts, stuffing stockings.
Surely, your parents, like mine, tried to paper over the sadness and the sudden shock of disillusion with lines about the spirit of giving. Sigh.
That moment, that reality shift, is what Pax Ressler and Jackie Soro are going for in their latest work, “Girl Dolls: The American Musical.” It’s not Santa, though, but the iconic American Girl dolls evoking the shattering of innocence.
Heavy stuff.
But not surprisingly, knowing Ressler and Soro and their trademark cabaret-style, it’s also lots of fun.
While the audience is enjoying a piece of music (like the lyrics of the song that began this article), “it’s also working on them in a way we could never achieve by just talking,” Ressler said.
Music abounds. Ressler and Soro composed 17 songs for the show, performed by an on-stage three-musician band, plus Ressler. “Girl Dolls” runs May 9 through May 17 at FringeArts.
“It’s like having a poisoned cookie in their bellies. It’s fun and invitational, and then something explodes in the stomach that is a little more complex,” Ressler said.
Schoolteacher Pleasant T. Rowland introduced the first American Girl dolls in 1986, writing stories about each, and using the stories of the plucky little girls to teach American history. The original trio, out of seven, were Kirsten, a Swedish immigrant (1854); Samantha, an orphan, (1904); and Molly, (1944), whose father, a doctor, cared for the wounded during World War II.
“They were a phenomenon,” said Soro, whose godmother took her to tea at the American Girl flagship store in Chicago.
“It’s hard to describe how seductive they were, because, as opposed to Barbie and other dolls, they were precious,” Soro said. “They required a level of care, a level of respect and a level of reverence. They were so fancy and expensive and high quality.”
Growing up as a little boy in a Mennonite household near Lancaster, Ressler could only admire their sister’s doll.
Giving her Kirsten, a Swedish immigrant, “was a win-win for my parents,” Ressler said. “It was the perfect doll because it was the closest thing to Mennonite immigration to the United States. It was educational and something we could learn from, as opposed to TV, which we weren’t allowed.”
“My sister had Kirsten and I did not,” she said.
As children, Soro and Ressler said they admired the dolls.
“There is something healing about spending a lot of time with these dolls – making girls feel really powerful in their identities, increasing their literacy through something special and cool, and then wanting to be like these spunky girls throughout history,” Ressler said.
Even so, as a second-grader Soro, who is biracial, couldn’t bring herself to choose Addy, the only Black doll out of the original seven.
“I didn’t think it was fair that a company that claimed to represent American girlhood had six white dolls and just one Black” doll, she said. “It stuck in my craw and it still does.”
So, when her grandparents let her choose, she chose Molly.
“When you are younger, you get the storybook version that is developmentally appropriate, but is also untrue,” Soro said. “But as you age, you begin to see cracks in that narrative. In high school, the façade completely cracked.”
More fissures emerged in college as Soro discovered more inconsistencies between the sanitized versions of history expressed by the dolls and the more disturbing realities. For Soro, what really “ripped the band-aid off,” was an article in the Paris Review that delineated the differences in the stories between the six white dolls and Addy.
“Other American Girls struggle, but Addy’s story is distinctly more traumatic,” wrote Brit Bennett in 2015. “She is a toy steeped in tragedy, and who is offered tragedy during play?”
On stage, Ressler and Soro duplicate the dichotomy in the dolls’ stories. “The company always puts something in the foreground, not letting us see what’s in the background. We’re giving the audience something in the foreground, but there’s something boiling in the background that is so untenable that it has to come out,” Ressler said.
For example, Kirsten, Ressler’s sister’s doll, braves the frontier as an immigrant, but her family was settling on the lands of indigenous people, rooting them from their homes.
Ressler and Soro, who have collaborated in many shows over the years, play the dolls in their innocence, also revealing the complicated and unseen back stories. They also play themselves in their innocence, gradually revealing deeper, more private moments as their awareness grows.
It leads to a dilemma.
We love our country, yet it’s violent and harsh. We love our dolls because they are precious and inspiring. How can we cope with the dissonance?
“That is exactly what we are grappling with,” Soro said. “It is a question we are grappling on a national level as we become disillusioned about the people in power and as we’ve become disillusioned about how the country functions?
“Do we throw the baby out with the bath water?”
FYI: “Girl Dolls: The American Musical,” May 9-17, FringeArts, 140 N. Columbus Blvd., Phila. 215-413-1318.
