"Jim Stowell has that uncanny ability to open up his soul and spill it across the stage, into the seats, and out the back door of any theater in town. Watching Stowell perform is like listening to your closest friend tell you the best story you have ever heard in your life."
I
have completed a new script entitled, Tall Shadows,
a play in four movements beginning in 1925 and ending in
1934. It is the prototype story of small a grassroots
organization fighting a rich powerful corporate interest.
This is the story of the battle between two extraordinary
men, explorer conservationist Ernest Oberholtzer and lumber
magnate E. W. Backus. The story of two completely different
ways of seeing the natural world. Mr. Backus had a plan to
build seven dams and possibly four power plants in northern
Minnesota that would have flooded all of what is now the
B.W.C.A., most of Superior National Forest, most of what is
now Voyageurs National Park. A plan to flood an estimated
six thousand square miles. Oberholtzer lead the fight to
stop this. This is a story that we are still living with
today and the questions we are still working on to this day.
Who knows what is best for our wild places?
Tall Shadows is part one of a trilogy. Part two is a
play about Sigrid Olson. Part three is a one-man play about
my years in the National Park Service, living, hiking, and
canoeing in wild places. People who know me understand that
for years I have been talking about the need for plays
telling stories about “the environment.” I believe there is
an audience out there waiting, dying, to hear stories about
their heroes: Ernest Oberholtzer, Sigrid Olson, John Muir,
and the list goes’ on and on. History and the present day
are dense with wonderful, exciting, heartrending, and
inspiring stories about that huge subject, “the
environment.”
And my writing partner in
Church Basement Ladies,
Jessica Zuehlke and I are very excited to be currently
writing a new musical entitled, A Wagonload of Shoes,
a story about children from Worthington, MN, helping
children in Germany after WWII.
I
have completed a new script entitled, Tall Shadows,
a play in four movements beginning in 1925 and ending in
1934. It is the prototype story of small a grassroots
organization fighting a rich powerful corporate interest.
This is the story of the battle between two extraordinary
men, explorer conservationist Ernest Oberholtzer and lumber
magnate E. W. Backus. The story of two completely different
ways of seeing the natural world. Mr. Backus had a plan to
build seven dams and possibly four power plants in northern
Minnesota that would have flooded all of what is now the
B.W.C.A., most of Superior National Forest, most of what is
now Voyageurs National Park. A plan to flood an estimated
six thousand square miles. Oberholtzer lead the fight to
stop this. This is a story that we are still living with
today and the questions we are still working on to this day.
Who knows what is best for our wild places?