On Stage: Performing Arts at our Oneonta Campuses by Rachel Frick Cardelle

Students To Stage Story Focusing on Jack the Ripper’s Victims

The worldwide premier of “Dead by Jack: The Victims of Jack the Ripper,” directed by Kiara Pipino, comes to Oneonta next week! This is one of the exciting things about living in a small town like ours, with two colleges: One gets all the peace and beauty of a rural life, while at the same time there always seems to be loads happening on the art, lecture, special guest, musical, and theater fronts. To find out more about how “Dead by Jack” came to be, I went right to the source and interviewed the SUNY Oneonta students and director responsible for its development and writing.

My guess is that 86-94 percent of those reading this article know who Jack the Ripper was. But that range is probably closer to 4-7 percent if I ask who Elizabeth Stride, Annie Chapman, Polly Nichols, Mary Jane Kelly or Kate Eddowes were. [Those numerical ranges are based on some extremely complicated, logical analysis, I swear! Or at least a wild guess made on my part, to make a point.] Those are the names of the five female victims of Jack the Ripper, a serial killer who terrorized the Whitechapel area in London, England in 1888. “Dead by Jack” is a play that tells the stories of these women.

Over the winter holiday break, the cast began doing research on the characters in the play. [One thing I know for a fact is that the amount of homework I did over college winter breaks was in the 0–0.01 percent range.] After they returned from their break a month ago, they began to develop the script. Ava Cancredi and Evelyn Winters described to me how they wrote the script based on specific moments they found compelling in the women’s lives.

“We began by creating moments for each character, picking which pieces of the character’s life we wanted to visualize. Since there are no ‘scenes,’ we created little moments from our research. It is all very symbolic, not literal,” Ava began.

“At the beginning of the whole process, Kiara asked us to pick out five different parts of our victims’ lives that we want to highlight. We chose what we thought was very important. Instead of it being just a verbal way of explaining their lives, we added a lot to the visual part. A lot of what we included [in the script] to highlight the women’s lives was because things at the time were blown out of proportion by the press. A lot of the things that people think they know about the victims is false. Like everyone thought they were all prostitutes, so we wanted to tell the truth,” Evelyn went on to explain.

“The first rehearsal we did in here [Hamblin Theater] was those ‘moments.’ We created these moments, and I had Annie, and she had the ‘kiss of death’ by her husband. Getting to create something out of that was huge. The first bit of my script was around that,” Angie Delgado commented. [For those who want more information on this “kiss of death,” you must come to the show. It wasn’t, I assure you, that she was married to Jack the Ripper. Although maybe she was…?]

“We also do a lot with sound, where we try to incorporate musical instruments. We incorporate lights, too. Even if they had been prostitutes, they were more than that. We were trying to create entire people [when we wrote this],” Leah Fridman continued.

Kara Durkin elaborated further on how they slowly pieced the play together, working to use all these elements—the actors’ words, the visualization of different moments, the instruments, the lights—to keep the play from being too predictable. None of them wanted it to come across as a scholarly lecture.

Early in the development of the script, Kiara had “talked them through a corridor,” as Evelyn explained to me, walking them through the lives of the women in an immersive exercise, helping them to connect to the victims. Evelyn and the rest of the cast and crew agreed that this exercise helped them all to connect to the characters…leaving all of them, cast and crew alike, crying. Kiara explained this is an exercise that often happens in the rehearsal process, although usually halfway through the rehearsal period, not at the beginning. She chose to do it at the beginning since this was a devised piece—one the actors themselves wrote in the rehearsal process—so she wanted them to get deep into their characters prior to the writing.

“It is interesting to think about, at least at our age, that the victims were in their 40s. I realized they were my mom’s age,” Evelyn commented.

“Except my character. My character was 25 years old, and yeah, it was weird to think about how much older the other victims were,” Ava added.

“It is so different from other pieces about Jack the Ripper because you really get to walk through the lives of the women. Alcoholism, domestic violence, family matters…as much as [this play] talks about events from the past, it talks about things from the present. It isn’t just something that happened in the past. We get to see the [victims] get married, have children—we don’t get to see them as just one-dimensional victims. I think it is a real honor to get to play Polly,” Jessy Gardner commented.

As one of the only two males in this show, Vinnie Iurillo focused on Jack the Ripper himself, which was a challenge since, as it was an unsolved series of crimes, no one knows who Jack was.
“My research was on the history of the events, who Jack the Ripper might have been, was it a he or a she…I watched documentaries about the murders. [I think] he might have been a doctor, based on how the bodies were mutilated.”

Kaia Laden researched modern victims of killers who mutilate the bodies of their victims, to give the play some perspective. Just as the victims of Jack the Ripper seemed to be dismissed by people of their time because they were all seen as prostitutes, and therefore almost “deserving” of their fates, Kaia found that a disturbing number of modern-day victims in the unsolved cases she researched are women of color, and Native American women. Kaia and the other cast and crew members talked about society’s ability, both in 1888 and today, to devalue the lives of some victims as though some of us are worth more than others; a fact that in writing and presenting this play, these students hope to make us all think twice about.

As I interviewed the students over an hour, knowing they had added an hour to their rehearsal just to do this, I was struck both by their commitment to this work and how well they all seemed to get along. As we moved into how they put this script together, that closeness was given voice by the students themselves.

“The first days I walked into rehearsal were really confusing,” said Ava. “We only had a month to write and rehearse this script.”

Kara told me that she had done a devised script like this in high school, but they had four months of preparation, not one.

“We get along so well, and we marinate in each other’s ideas,” said Angie.

The cast and crew are predominantly women, with only two men in the production. The underlying theme of the show is violence against women. So how did it feel having these two men in the room Or being these two men?

“We didn’t know Vinnie and Kolby Cappelletti the first day and [yet] we all bonded,” Leah recounted.

“It was intimidating, and I had to walk into the room and slash throats,” Vinnie laughed.

“I think for me, I am not good in social situations. I walked in, I didn’t know anybody, it was very intimidating. So I made jokes and they laughed!” Kolby told me.

“Our chemistry is insane. We can be vulnerable in hard moments [in rehearsal]. Having guys who are genuinely—don’t let this go to either of your heads—good men and supportive is great. They were both raised right,” Evelyn voiced as she looked around the group.

Everyone grinned and nodded their heads in agreement.

Personally, I would say that all the cast and crew of this production have been raised right. And that watching the show it is a real pleasure to, how did Angie put it? Marinate in their ideas.

You can watch “Dead by Jack: The Victims of Jack the Ripper”—directed by Kiara Pipino and written and performed by SUNY Oneonta students—in the Fine Arts Center’s Hamblin Theater on SUNY O’s campus March 1 and 2 at 7:30 p.m., March 3 at 2 p.m. and March 5 and 6 at 7:30 p.m. The cost is $5.00 for general admission or free with a SUNY Oneonta student ID.

UP NEXT: “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged),” directed by Marc Shaw and performed by Hartwick College students, April 10-13.