Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of a playwright?
Our Author Insights series features personal essays from playwrights, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the ideas and experiences that shaped their work.
Below, read “Anyone Can Be a Hero: Theatre, History, and Orphan Train”, where composer Doug Katsaros and playwright L. E. McCullough reflect on their musical Orphan Train. You can also download a free PDF that pairs the essay with short, classroom-ready activities for students.
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Anyone Can Be a Hero: Theatre, History, and Orphan Train
Doug Katsaros and L. E. McCullough
Orphan Train is rooted in American history and depicts one of our nation’s most powerful movements for social change. Orphan Train is a play about what society in the 1800s called “surplus children” and what we as a society are prepared to do about our own surplus children today.
It’s theatre as public service. Theatre as community activism. Theatre driven to spur its audiences into action that might change the life of just one child. If that sounds a bit quixotic, don’t forget that the impetus for the play came from a dream.
“I saw a procession of Victorian mothers,” recalls composer Doug Katsaros, “each carefully dressing a small child in formal clothes, then leading the child to a large wooden door and leaving them. The door creaked open and out came a procession of somber, robed women who one-by-one took the children into a circle where a man in a uniform ushered them into a bank of fog.”
Unable to shake the dream’s haunting images, Katsaros teamed with New York lyricist Michael Barry Greer to create the song “Lullaby,” a cascading choral anthem that forms the heart of a vibrant score evoking a uniquely American soundscape — Tin Pan Alley brashness merging with poignant Celtic folk strains, labor songs, gospel, honky-tonk, fiddle tunes and vaudeville.
For book writer L.E. McCullough, the Orphan Train story has a personal resonance. “My great-grandfather and grandfather were both orphaned as young children in Wisconsin and Iowa,” he says. “They and their siblings were dispersed to other families, some to relatives, some to neighbors. Telling the Orphan Train story has been a tribute to them and to the families who made that commitment.”
Orphan Train, however, is no mere history lesson about a bygone era of starry-eyed dreamers whose faith-driven social movement transformed America’s concept of childcare; it is a play that believes in the power of live theatre to change the lives of 21st-century children.
It is a play that tells the audience, “The people you see on stage made a difference in their world. So can you.”
In a nation hungering for comic book saviors, Orphan Train shows how anyone be a hero for real.