Most productions of “A Christmas Carol” don’t require forty-five actors. But that’s how many people auditioned for a recent staging near Hardwick, Vermont, and Rose Friedman, the director, decided to populate a whole village and cast them all. Friedman is the co-founder of the Civic Standard, a community organization based in Hardwick. “A Christmas Carol” was its third production, though the Civic is not exactly a theatre company, and many of the people in the show were not exactly seasoned performers. But they all braved whiteout conditions to attend a four-hour dress rehearsal in early December, at the Highland Center for the Arts, a three-hundred-seat theatre, loosely modelled after the Globe, that rises without warning from the desolate winter hills like a very expensive cupcake.
Heather Lanphear, who works at Buffalo Mountain Market in Hardwick, starred in her first Civic production this past spring—a live game show in which audience members competed for real prizes, such as a gift card for gas with enough money on it to get to Morrisville, a few towns over. In “A Christmas Carol,” Lanphear was Mabel the turkeymonger, a role that Friedman made up for her. Lanphear, fifty-five, has short gray hair and two hoops in her left nostril. At first, she had no lines and a single, brief stage appearance near the end of the show.
“I was kind of bummed out about it,” Lanphear told me at rehearsal. “Sitting through this whole thing just for fucking thirty seconds onstage? I’m not that patient.” But another cast member dropped out, and Friedman gave Lanphear a speaking part during the scene in which the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come shows Scrooge his death. “It sort of turns into me realizing that I’m an asshole, and I don’t need to be,” Lanphear said.
For Friedman, forty-three, who has been a theatre director and performer in Vermont for almost twenty years, the Civic’s project is community building as a kind of performance art, except that nobody has to talk about it in terms of performance art. “Heather works at the co-op. I see her restocking shelves, and all of a sudden she’s onstage pretending to sell papier-mâché turkeys a hundred and fifty years ago,” Friedman told me. “We’re play-acting a version of our town, and there are these stark moral lessons that could be overlaid on our real-life community. I’m interested in how people experience this story when it’s played by their neighbors.”
Hardwick, a town of around three thousand people, lies in the austerely beautiful corner of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom. Things there are named for what they are. The laundromat in the village is called the Hardwick Village Laundromat; Dave’s Sawmill, on Sawmill Lane, is owned by a guy named Dave. In recent years, the town has faced the pandemic, catastrophic floods, and the increasingly urgent question of how to thrive on its own terms. Meanwhile, the rest of the world seems to have no shortage of ideas about what a small, rural town should be. At the edge of Hardwick, an eight-million-dollar visitors’ center and agribusiness incubator recently opened, to mixed reception. When I asked a resident what the building contained, they told me, “Cheese and shit.”
The Civic’s first show, which débuted at the Hardwick American Legion, in 2023, struck a similarly wary note. “Developed to Death,” an original work of murder-mystery dinner theatre, featured twenty-two actors, all from Hardwick and the surrounding area. The play took the form of a town meeting in which an out-of-state developer pitches his vision for a revitalized Hardwick—including “a world-class helicopter ski resort,” “endless housing,” and a new name and slogan: “Softwick Falls: Because It Doesn’t Have to Be So Hard.” Mid-PowerPoint, he croaks. Friedman wanted to capture the particular anguish, familiar to denizens of small towns everywhere, of being steamrolled by a developer with no stake in the community. Murder seemed useful here. “If the guy dies, is the project dead?” she wondered. “Is that how we stop it?”
David Upson, the town manager, played himself in the show. He had basically never acted before. “In high school, I played a dead guy,” Upson told me. “That was a really easy part. I fell out of a closet.” Friedman worried that no one would come, but every performance in the four-day run sold out. The reason for this enthusiasm might be that in Hardwick, as in many places, there is a sense that something is missing. Older Legionnaires talk about how the younger generation isn’t there to receive the torch; much of the town’s housing is expensive, in bad shape, or both. Many of the rituals that once brought the community together—the Kiwanis Club Ice Fishing Derby, fiddling contests so explosive that spectators sometimes came to blows—have faded away. “People are disconnected,” Buffy Casto, a Hardwick E.M.T., told me. “We have a lot of people every year who are attempting suicide or overdosing, and there are elderly people who call emergency medicine a lot, just because they’re so lonely.”
Friedman and her friend Tara Reese started the Civic in 2022. In addition to its theatrical productions, the group has hosted free weekly suppers, prom-dress swaps, Magic: The Gathering tournaments, skate-park-planning meetings, karaoke nights, and honky-tonks, among other happenings. The point is to give the people of Hardwick a reason to be together—not in curated, self-selecting affinity groups, but in the unavoidable strangeness of a town. In Hardwick, this includes French Canadian families whose roots go six or seven generations deep, back-to-the-landers, dairy farmers, loggers, carpenters, veterans, concrete-pourers, artists, off-the-grid queer anarchists, and several people named Butch.
“There’s this thing that everybody has in their minds, and we’re enacting it,” Friedman told me. “It’s nostalgic, but it’s nostalgia for a thing that most people never experienced.”
The Civic is headquartered in a two-story red clapboard house built on the banks of the Lamoille River, between the Village Restaurant and Mike’s Service Center. The building once housed the offices of the Hardwick Gazette, which stopped printing in 2020, during the pandemic. (The Gazette, now a nonprofit with a partly volunteer staff, still publishes online.) In the summer of 2022, the Civic took over the building in what Friedman describes as a “formal squatting arrangement,” wherein the organization paid no rent and covered just the monthly utility costs. Last winter, the owners of the Gazette officially donated the building to the Civic.
Reese and Friedman have discarded the bulk of the paper’s old typesetting equipment, but the interior still has the cozy, liminal atmosphere of a place where people might drop in unannounced to lodge a complaint or tell their life story, both of which are routine occurrences at the Civic. The main room, lit by foraged floor lamps and string lights, contains an assortment of mismatched chairs and a floral-patterned couch that seems to have achieved a sort of sentience. In the winter, a propane heater labors to keep up with the drafts slicing through the single-pane glass windows. The Civic’s community suppers, held each Wednesday, attract a cross-section of Hardwick—gangly teen-age boys who wolf down their food in companionable silence; families with young children; men in baseball hats and Carhartt jackets who congregate in the foyer, looking the entire time as if they’re about to leave.
“When we first started, we wanted it to feel like the circus was always coming to town,” Reese told me. “When we’re on a roll, it really does feel like that. And that’s the most magical thing ever.” Someone once told her that the Civic reminded them of a punk house, only even more punk, because there were ten-year-olds and Republicans in it. In this spirit, Reese explained, she and Friedman don’t assign people to wash dishes after supper. “Then it just becomes so organized, you know?” she said. “There’s a fine line.”
Neither Friedman nor Reese grew up in Hardwick. Friedman, the daughter of a playwright-actor and a director, was born in New York City and spent her childhood following her parents as they toured around the country. When she was a teen-ager, her mother got a job in the theatre department at Barnard, and her family moved back to Manhattan. The bus Friedman took to high school each day went by an abandoned Catholic girls’ school that looked like a giant castle, and Friedman would spend the ride fantasizing about all the things she could do with the building. “It was some combination of an orphanage and a theatre and apartments and a soup kitchen,” she told me. “In some way, it was going to meet the needs of every person in the world.”
After college, Friedman joined Bread & Puppet, an avant-garde theatre troupe and quasi-commune tucked in the hills of northern Vermont. There, she met her husband, Justin Lander, a fellow-performer. In 2008, Lander and Friedman settled in East Hardwick after starting their own theatre company. They played vaudeville and puppet shows in unaccommodating venues—town greens, municipal buildings, and, once, a defunct aquarium-supply store. But Friedman always wanted these performances to add up to something more. “When I don’t know the audience, I’m, like, What the fuck is the point of this? These are just bodies in a room,” she said. “There’s no conversation that we’re having over a long period of time. There’s no feeling of ‘Oh, my God, that guy came. He’s never come to something before.’ ”
Reese, who is forty-eight, was born outside of Akron, Ohio. Her father poured concrete and her mother cleaned houses, and she grew up feeling that she could never belong to the class of people who made art. “My family crocheted,” Reese explained. “Knitting was for rich people.” She played cello in her high-school orchestra, and she can still remember when her grandmother, a coal miner’s wife with a fourth-grade education, whooped at her from the audience during a recital, “That’s my little shit!” “She was excited and proud of me, and she just hillbillied the fuck out of herself,” Reese said.
At seventeen, Reese dropped out of school and moved to San Francisco, where she spent a decade and a half working odd jobs and “trying to be cultured,” as she put it. She had two sons, Finn and Lyle; in 2010, she broke up with their father and moved the family east, eventually settling into an old farmhouse on a dirt road in Walden, not far from Hardwick. Reese longed for community, but she didn’t know where to find it. At her sons’ baseball games, she usually sat alone. “I wasn’t a homestead-y mom, and I wasn’t from here,” she said. “And you kind of had to be one or the other to fit in.”
Then, in January, 2020, at seventeen, Finn killed himself. He had been a star baseball player and a volunteer firefighter, the sort of person who could find something to talk about with anyone. “Finn saw the divide in Hardwick,” Upson, the town manager, who coached Finn and Lyle’s baseball team, told me. “He saw the rednecks, the hippies, the alternative kids, and he wanted to bring them all together.” After Finn died, Reese told me, she couldn’t see much point in continuing to live. But then a strange energy began to gather around her, an outpouring of grief for Finn that made her fall in love with Hardwick at last. The Village Restaurant named a sandwich after Finn, and the high school held a bonfire and a memorial service. After the memorial, the school cafeteria served Finn’s favorite lunch—B.L.T.s, clementines, and root beer.
For months after Finn’s death, Reese’s neighbors brought her home-cooked meals. One day, she found a basket of roast chicken and potatoes in her mudroom, with a note from Friedman. Reese and Friedman lived less than two miles apart—in fact, Finn had been an usher at one of Friedman and Lander’s vaudeville shows, to which Reese had always stubbornly refused to go—but the women had never met. Reese sent Friedman a thank-you note, and in December, 2020, they went for a walk together. In that first meeting, they dreamed up the Civic. Before Finn’s death, Reese had wanted to start a café in the basement of a local church; Friedman had been making enormous batches of soup and giving it out in the parking lot of the East Hardwick Grange Hall. They realized that they had been circling the same thing—a desire for communion with the town, something that felt at once transcendent and deeply particular.
“We were talking about the Black Panther free-lunch program. We were talking about bingo night,” Friedman recalled. “From the beginning, it was all about community events and grief.” That November, a local radio producer, Erica Heilman, made a show about Finn, and the town’s collective mourning, for her podcast, “Rumble Strip,” which won a Peabody Award. In the wake of the story, people started opening up to Reese about their own pain. “I think I gave the town permission to be vulnerable,” Reese said. “Not because I was thinking at all. I was psychotic. But even in my psychosis I didn’t want people to shut down.” For the next few months, Friedman, Reese, and Heilman hashed out how the Civic might work. (Heilman, who was on the Civic’s board of directors until last summer, has remained a supporter and chronicler of the organization through “Rumble Strip.”)
In January, 2022, Friedman and Reese organized their first event—a bonfire at a local farm stand around the two-year anniversary of Finn’s death. “I was pounding the pavement to get people to come,” Reese said. “Literally stopping people on the street, texting and calling everyone I knew in town.” Dozens of people showed up at Butch’s Harvest’ore, in Walden, to eat chili and drink Twisted Tea and cry.
Later that year, the Civic hosted a spaghetti-and-opera evening at the American Legion. That night, Ashton Allen, then the commander of the Hardwick Sons of the Legion, was having a beer in the Legion’s downstairs bar. “When I heard there was an opera upstairs, I thought, I have to go up and see this sparse little crowd, because there’s no way that’s going to work at the Legion,” he said. To his amazement, the room was full of people watching “La Traviata” by electric tea light. “I’m sure opera is bad enough in person, but to watch it on a screen, with not the greatest sound system—people were really taking a leap of faith,” he said. “That’s the first of many times I’ve been wrong about the events they’ve done.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, Hardwick had a thriving granite industry. Then the granite boom ended, and the town eventually became notorious for its violent bar fights. For a time in the seventies, the movie theatre on Main Street showed X-rated films at night, and parents didn’t let their children go downtown by themselves. Upson grew up in Hardwick; when he was in high school, in the late nineties, he told me, people were constantly beating each other up. “Over anything,” he said. “Over looking at somebody funny.”
In recent decades, Hardwick has shed its belligerent reputation. But it still prides itself on being hard, and outsiders quickly get sized up. “If you go into the Legion and talk shit about Hardwick, you’ll get your ass kicked, I believe,” Upson told me. “People who come in hot and heavy and want to get on the select board and think they know what Hardwick needs best—they come and go.”
In the late two-thousands, a handful of flourishing food and agricultural enterprises in the area caught the attention of national media, which proclaimed “hardscrabble Hardwick” to be in the midst of a locavore renaissance. “Facing a Main Street dotted with vacant stores, residents of this hardscrabble community of 3,000 are reaching into its past to secure its future, betting on farming to make Hardwick the town that was saved by food,” the New York Times reported in 2008. Around that time, a local author wrote a book, “The Town That Food Saved,” which posited that Hardwick’s artisanal-food movement—largely powered by young entrepreneurs with college degrees and access to investor funding—could be a national model for small-town revitalization.
“People were pretty put out by that book,” Upson told me. Some bristled at the suggestion that Hardwick’s salvation lay in microgreens. (Or, if you like, cheese and shit.) But their underlying objection, Upson explained, was to the imposition of a narrative. The town hadn’t been waiting for anyone to save it. People in Hardwick had been farming and feeding their neighbors for generations, without fanfare or venture capital. The new food and agriculture businesses brought some jobs to the area, but, for most Hardwick residents, life didn’t change at all.
Hardwick’s culture of self-reliance includes a corollary skepticism of anything that looks like charity. During the height of the pandemic, Allen told me, he knew a lot of people in Hardwick were struggling, so he put on a free Thanksgiving spread at the Legion. “We did six turkeys, almost forty pounds of squash, fifty pounds of mashed potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce. My mother made stuffing. And we got sixteen people, because we advertised it all wrong—‘If you need a meal, please come,’ ” Allen said. “I fucked up when I did that. Nobody wants to feel like they’re destitute.”
In the early days of the Civic, Reese spent a lot of time in the downstairs bar of the Legion, trying to impress upon the regulars that she and Friedman weren’t a Trojan horse for socialism. The analogy that finally seemed to click, she told me, was Robin Hood: “Yes, it’s your tax dollars, and yes, sir, we do get government grants. But we’re giving it all back to you.” It didn’t hurt that the Legion’s relationship with the Civic turned out to be good for business. Since the Civic began holding events there, the Legion’s revenue has grown by forty-five per cent.
The Civic brought people to the Legion who might not have set foot inside otherwise, including Buffy Casto, the Hardwick E.M.T., who hosts the Civic’s karaoke nights there. Casto is queer, and the Legion, known as the clubhouse for Hardwick’s good old boys, is not the kind of place where Casto would typically feel at home. One night, Casto got into an intense discussion with Phil Mercier, the manager of the Legion, in the Legion’s upstairs kitchen. “We were both a little tipsy,” Casto said. She asked Mercier what he would do if he saw someone getting harassed for being queer. Mercier said he wouldn’t tolerate aggressive behavior. (When they returned to the downstairs bar together and someone asked what they’d been up to, Mercier replied gruffly, “We weren’t having sex, if that’s what you’re thinking.”)
In July, 2023, when devastating floods struck Vermont, Hardwick was among the worst-hit towns in the state. The Lamoille River swept away half a motel. Allen told me he’s pretty sure he heard the building collide with a bridge downriver. I asked him what that sounded like. “Like a building hitting a bridge,” he explained. Overnight, the Civic became the town’s de-facto emergency command center. “It was just another weird thing we were doing,” Friedman said. Reese organized teams of volunteers and dispatched them to muck out basements, and the Civic rented dumpsters to collect the sodden debris that piled up along the side of the road. “What they did was shit you would see FEMA doing,” Monique Brochu, a fourth-generation Hardwick native whose father owns the garage next door to the Civic, told me. “That got through to a lot of the hearts in this town—a lot of the really closed, cold hearts.”
Ann Gilcris, a member of the Ladies Auxiliary at the Legion, complained to Reese that one of her shovels had mysteriously vanished after volunteers cleaned out her basement. At a Civic honky-tonk a few months later, on what happened to be Gilcris’s eighty-first birthday, Reese gave her a new shovel with her name bedazzled in rhinestones on the blade. Another recipient of the Civic’s flood relief, Mike Ditzler, had four feet of sewage-contaminated water in his basement. He knew a couple of the volunteers who came to his house; one was his son’s former Tae Kwon Do teacher. At first, he told me, he was uncomfortable accepting help, but that feeling quickly dissipated. “We learned a lot as far as how good people are,” Ditzler said. “Because I don’t bother anybody, don’t bother with anybody.” The following spring, the Civic hosted a joint birthday party for Ditzler’s two kids.
In the past year, Reese and Friedman have attended conferences and met with Vermont’s congressional delegation to talk about how the Civic has created a durable sense of community in these bleak, divided times. This past March, they went to Belfast, Maine, to meet with a group that wanted to replicate the Civic but had been struggling to draw people to their “listening circles.” People across the country have asked for the script of the murder mystery so they can stage it in their own communities, hoping it might shore up local identity in the face of development pressure. Friedman always says no to these requests. “If I hand you the script, you’re gonna have to rewrite the entire thing, because it has nothing to do with North Carolina,” she told me. “It’s not a xeroxable thing.” The power of the Civic lies in its specificity to Hardwick, and specificity does not scale.
As word of the Civic’s improbable success has travelled beyond the town, Reese said, she’s become disillusioned with the narrative that she and Friedman stumbled upon a solution to loneliness and polarization in their community. For her, the seed of the Civic will always be unbearable loss, which is inseparable from the profound love she felt from Hardwick in the wake of Finn’s death. From the beginning, she’s struggled to sort out where her personal life ends and the Civic begins—partly because of the demands of running an enterprise that is at once a community center, an arts organization, and a social-services agency, and partly because of the way the Civic tethered her to the story of Finn. “This town saved me, and it’s also eating me alive,” she said. In mid-July, Reese quit. She’s now milking cows on a friend’s dairy farm. “I’m, like, Tara, you created this thing out of the ashes of your being to get at the answers of the universe, and now you’re getting shit on by cows,” she told me recently. “Who won this existential argument, T-dog?”
In mid-December, a half hour before showtime on the sold-out opening night of “A Christmas Carol,” the cavernous lobby of the Highland Center was full of people mingling around a banquet table laden with finger foods. The Civic’s first two productions were held in somewhat less grand environs—the fluorescent-lit Legion Hall and the un-air-conditioned, circa-1860 Hardwick Town House—and Friedman decided to stage “A Christmas Carol” to accentuate the Highland Center’s slightly awkward formality.
Before curtain, Friedman, wearing a green-and-black striped velvet dress and red cowboy boots, instructed the actors to go out into the lobby in costume and socialize with the audience. She wanted people to be confused about whether the performance had actually begun, an effect she seemed to achieve. “The town manager’s walking around in a police uniform,” someone in the lobby mused. “Don’t know if I’m supposed to talk to him.” Several people helping themselves to canapés were visibly startled when they looked out the window and saw a group of children dressed as Victorian urchins standing outside in the blowing snow, gazing longingly at the spread beyond their reach. Friedman had directed them to stay in character, even though nobody inside would be able to hear them. “That old lady is just helping herself!” a small girl with blond pigtails hissed as a woman put stuffed mushrooms on her plate.
Just before seven-thirty, Friedman stationed herself in the back of the theatre. As people came in and took their seats, she noted them with an almost compulsive delight, as if they were guests arriving at a wedding. “There’s another Rowell,” she said approvingly. The pre-show in the lobby had been just the right level of awkward, she told me. “I could feel the audience was a little stiff, and it was kind of great,” she said.
Then the house lights dimmed, and the show began. The play hewed closely to the original script, with a few splashes of local color. When Scrooge is visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley—played by Friedman’s husband, Lander, who used his own tractor chains for his costume—Scrooge dismisses him as “a fragment of an undercooked gas-station chicken tender.” In a handful of scenes, one of the cast members sat in a chair at the edge of the stage, holding various handwritten posters (“CHOLERA IS A HOAX”; “MAKE A SIMPLE COMMITMENT TO DECENCY”), as an homage to the woman who keeps a solitary vigil once a week on the bench outside the Civic building. (Friedman had personally urged the bench protester to see the play and even saved her a ticket at the box office; on Saturday night, she did.) At one point, two people in the audience got up and left. “Shit, did we lose them?” Friedman muttered. When they returned a few minutes later, she smiled.
As the audience trickled out into the lobby after the show, I took the elevator to the upper balcony, where I met twenty-one-year-old John Diamond, a soft-spoken light tech. “Today was a struggle,” he told me. The spotlight bulb had exploded twenty minutes before the start of the performance. He’d found a replacement, but it was dimmer and harder to use. Diamond had come to Hardwick from California, around Halloween, without a job or a place to stay, and started hanging around the Civic. Shortly after that, Hardwick police caught him sleeping in the Civic building. Friedman did not press charges. Instead, she enlisted him in the show. ♦
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