The Scene Stealer
by Jonathan Beasley
Here . . . time is measured in bells.—noe venable
Her performance on the evening of June 2 in Andover Chapel did not seem like that of an amateur. The acting, the singing, the writing—this was surely the creation of an experienced playwright or songwriter, not a senior project performed by a budding teacher and student of religious studies. Her timing was too good; her delivery, too precise.
Perhaps then, it should have come as no surprise to learn that Noe Venable is no amateur—at least not musically.
Venable, who graduated from HDS on June 4 with a master of theological studies degree, began writing songs at age 19. In the intimate setting of the chapel, she performed her new one-person play, The Homecomer, which was written for her final project in the Program in Religious Studies and Education (PRSE) at HDS.
Some years ago, it might have seemed improbable that there would be a night when she would again act—not just sing and play her guitar. After enrolling in Bennington College in Vermont to study playwriting, she dropped out of school and moved back home to the Bay Area.
"At that time, I wasn't quite ready to write plays," she explained. "I was ready to write songs, because they are very short. There's a different kind of attention span required to write a play, and that's actually a part of my life story that most of the people I'm close to and most of my musical collaborators and friends don't really know about. It's like a former self that I'd put away."
Upon returning home, she quickly became a fixture on the San Francisco folk music scene. She toured with Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Ani DiFranco and collaborated and performed with such musical acts as They Might Be Giants and Nels Cline, the guitarist for Chicago's alternative rock band Wilco.
After focusing on music for nearly a decade, Venable decided to go back to school. She enrolled at Hunter College in New York, where she studied comparative religion. There, a professor "gently steered" her in the direction of academia and told her about Harvard Divinity School, "which is how I ended up here," she said.
As time for the final project for the PRSE loomed, The Homecomer was not part of Venable's original plan. The idea stemmed from a meeting with Diane Moore, director of the PRSE. Moore, who was unaware that Venable had experience in playwriting, asked her student about writing a play for the senior research seminar. It hadn't occurred to Venable that she could revisit a former, if not hidden, passion and write a play for her final project.
"It was really one of those moments where somebody sees something inside you," she said. "Before I knew it, I'd said yes. But then I was thinking, 'Oh my god. What have I done? I can't write a play!' "
The play was inspired by her experiences teaching at Arlington High School in the fall of 2008. Venable taught an honors American literature course and co-taught "Foundations of English," a class for freshman who were required to take two periods of English a day because "they needed extra help."
It was those freshman English students whom Venable wrote about in the play and whose personas she adopted and imitated.
"I was moved, again and again, to see that a student who had been put in this level of class must have had some experience in school where they had been written off," she explained. "But if there's one thing I was trying to do as a teacher, it was to treat my students as creators. I tried to show them the ways I saw them creating their lives. One thing I learned is that, how somebody sees themselves as a student is such a tiny fragment for many people of who they are as a person."
Joining Venable at the front of Andover Chapel were Greta Gertler, who played piano and provided additional vocals for the original songs that Venable composed, and Lisabeth Liles, who accompanied her announcement of each new scene with a single ring of a hand bell.
Just days after The Homecomer debuted, Venable moved to New York, where she hopes to find a job teaching. "The ideal paradigm would be to find a school where the arts are really valued. I think in that case, it would be possible to be a writer, and a performer, and a teacher," she said.
She is well aware, however, that now is a difficult time to find a teaching position in the New York area. Public schools have instituted a hiring freeze on new teachers, and some teachers who have fewer than three years experience are being let go.
"Even though I was thinking that I was ready to jump right into my own classroom and see if I could make it work—being an artist and a teacher at the same time—as it happens, the universe has other plans for me at the moment."
At Arlington High and in The Homecomer, time is measured in bells. But there will not be a bell to let Noe Venable know that it is, again, time to move on. She is now an HDS alumna; she knows a new scene has begun.
(top)
