Between 1935 and 1943, nearly 100,000 residents of rural Kentucky had a unique method of getting entertainment and information delivered to their door.
It came by horse.
The Pack Horse Library Project, as it was formally known, was one of the many Depression-era programs designed to put people to work while also serving that now passé concept of the greater good. It emerged out of the same set of New Deal initiatives that codified Social Security, the 40-hour workweek and the national minimum wage.
The program stood out not only because of its equestrian delivery mode — a must in the steep, undeveloped backwoods of Appalachia — but because it was largely woman-led. Of the roughly 200 individuals employed by the project, most were women, not least the riders who braved the 100-mile weekly routes across eastern Kentucky in all seasons.
When local playwright Pam Kingsley first came across the history of these "packsaddle librarians" as part of a book club reading, she was fascinated by the project's history and started researching it further. The trip "down this rabbit hole," as she describes it, eventually resulted in her new play, Minister of Sorrow, which premieres this weekend at Stage Left Theater.
The seeds of this full-length work were first sown during Stage Left's streaming series, Masterpiece Monologues. In a spirit similar to the Pack Horse Library Project, the series was one of the theater's efforts to keep creators working and audiences entertained during widespread COVID shutdowns. For her contribution, Kingsley wrote an eight-minute piece revolving around a fictional packhorse librarian who must venture out on a cold, rainy day in November.
"And then from there," she says, "I couldn't let her go."
As Kingsley began crafting a fuller, more nuanced story around that character, she began developing themes around the phrase that lent the play its name. It comes from a line in "The Somnambulist," a William Wordsworth poem inspired by the tragic medieval romance of the knight errant Sir Eglamore and his wife, Lady Emma.
The sleepwalker of the poem's title is Lady Emma herself, whom Eglamore loves but neglects in the service of his noble adventures. Desperately lovesick and fatigued, Emma walks in a dreamlike state to a nearby waterfall, Aira Force, where the sad twist of the legend takes place.
"In the poem, 'minister of sorrow' refers to a man who has lost love and closed himself up from the world. And that kind of happens in my play. But also there are things called ministries of sorrow in which a person of faith goes out to others and ministers to them in their times of tribulation," Kingsley says.
"I felt, wow, I've got these two things. On the one hand, giving comfort, and on the other hand, isolation."
The basic framework of Kingsley's play-in-progress was her packhorse librarian, Emma Pace, setting out to visit her estranged husband, Harlan Cahill. A shared tragedy has caused them to seek solace in two very different worlds: Emma in the books that she is fond of quoting and distributes to grateful Kentuckians, Harlan in a punitive, prescriptive form of religion.
"The themes really hit home personally for me," says Sarah Dahmen, director of this inaugural run. "That 'ministry' that Emma has is also the way we share stories in community. Her carrying these books to the people in Appalachia is actually creating community through making stories more accessible — and the hope that comes with that too."
Through further workshopping with Spokane Playwrights Laboratory in 2022, Kingsley refined those core ideas and events, portraying them by means of flashbacks and incidental characters that Emma channels. With the help of that feedback, she also had a eureka moment where the fate of one of those characters became clear.
Hazel Bean, who ran lights for the Spokane Playwrights Laboratory staged reading, recalls how she "fell in love with the story, fell in love with the character" and resolved to audition for the role of Emma once the play got a full-length treatment.
After landing the part, she and Dahmen visited rural communities around the Spokane area to better ground her in the character. They sang hymns with the congregation of a country church, walked railroad tracks together and got hands-on experience with tying a saddle.
"I'm a suburban girl, so I had not met too many horses before," Bean says, laughing. "It was a great experience for me to just get a feel for the bonds that Emma would have had with her horse, Blue Moon, and for being out there in the woods with this companion."
True to its origins, Minister of Sorrow very much remains a single-actor piece with a weighty line load. But Emma's storytelling is aided by an onstage musician who provides a kind of live soundtrack using evocative songs, such as the ballads "Lord Remember Me" and "Omie Wise." In Kingsley's script, the musician is simply dubbed the Muse. The role is played in this production by multi-instrumentalist Joey Quintana.
"It's just amazing how much having a little underscoring from the Muse in those moments fills you with a new sense of purpose and a new motivation in these scenes. It's completely transformative, I think, for the play itself. Music is so much a part of the Appalachian mountain range and those communities that it's integral to this piece as well," Bean says.
"What's so beautiful about music is that, without any words, it can change how we feel in a moment. It can actually bring our hearts down into a really sober, somber, meaningful place and then with the flip of a switch, it can go back into this light, sunny morning," adds Dahmen.
Although this nearly three-week run marks what Kingsley considers to be Minister of Sorrow's "big unveiling," an earlier iteration of the expanded play met with success. In the summer of 2022, around the time that it was being workshopped by Spokane Playwrights Laboratory, Kingsley submitted her script to the Appalachian Playwriting Festival in North Carolina.
It was selected as the winning entry and in May of this year opened the 77th season at Parkway Playhouse near Asheville, North Carolina — the same community, incidentally, that would be catastrophically damaged by Hurricane Helene six months later.
Because of those meaningful connections to people and place, both past and present, Dahmen sees Minister of Sorrow as "bridging the gap" between urban and rural communities.
"Even though this is set in Appalachia in the 1930s, I feel like it really transcends to the beauty of rural America and the people that live there now. It's through that sharing of stories that we challenge how we feel and how we think and about other people and how we connect to our feelings and to bigger-picture themes," she says.
"For all of us, going out into the nooks and crannies of the space in which we live and sharing something of ourselves with others is very important right now. I hope a little of that is taken away by audiences who come to see the play," Kingsley adds.
"Frankly, I just want them to sit a spell and listen to some storytelling."
Minister of Sorrow • Dec. 6-22; Thu-Sat at 7 pm, Sun at 2 pm • $25-$30 • Stage Left Theater • 108 W. Third Ave. • stagelefttheater.org • 509-838-9727
