Area Woman Still Alive

Here we are again, you and I. Can you believe it? Me neither.

Over a year ago, I mentioned a new play I was writing for Paul Bunyan Playhouse in Bemidji, MN. Not long after, I found out the whole season was canceled while the venue went through renovations.

A lot has happened since then. For instance, I had my brain removed, and my skull refilled with A.I. slop videos of 35 bunnies jumping on a trampoline simultaneously. Just kidding. Unfortunately, I still have my old brain.

But a good thing did happen this year: Paul Bunyan Playhouse is back in action, and they asked me to finish Over a Barrel to be included in their 2026 season. Now we’re a little over two weeks out from opening night.

Even now, carried to me on the wind somehow, I can hear the costume designer cursing me for incorporating a horse that must have room for two human occupants. Or maybe it’s the director I hear, trying to figure out how to throw four people over Niagara Falls in an “artsy” way. Or perhaps it’s my own parents, who keep asking me for information they could easily find on the ticketing site. It’s ALL on the ticketing site. Oh my GOD.

Oh, speaking of the ticketing site:

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But that’s because I love this little piece of history: In 1901, the theatrical spectacle you simply had to see was Ben-Hur, which starred (aside from the people, of course) real horses running on sort of treadmills. You can see the layout below, complete with a moving cyclorama background to help sell the illusion that the chariots were racing around at a breakneck pace:

The spectacle that was the live Ben-Hur event ran for over two decades after its original Broadway opening in 1899, which then launched tours all over the country. By 1901, it was playing in Chicago, at the Illinois Theatre.

In Over a Barrel, our industrious heroes Eunice, Flo, Dottie, and Mack have a stroke of luck on the streets of Chicago just as they’re about to freeze to death, when a man offers them four tickets to that evening’s showing of Ben-Hur.

They head to the theater mostly looking for warmth, and end up on stage, performing the entirety of Ben-Hur without ever having seen the script. I won’t spoil anything else about this absolutely unbelievable scene, but suffice it to say, some of them have to play a horse.

Toying with real historical events of the time was one of my favorite aspects of writing this play, and this is just one little way I smashed together real history with outrageous fiction.

I’ll be back over the next couple of weeks, giving some more insight into the intersection of the historical and the theatrical in Over a Barrel, and updates from the road as we travel up north for the world premiere (!!!)

If you’re in the area, please do come see the show! It’s Paul Bunyan Playhouse’s first-ever new play commission, and I want there to be many more to come.

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~Allison