SHARING THE MESSAGE

Marci Miller of ‘Days of Our Lives’ fame joins Louisville production of ‘Helper’

Marci Miller, a three-time Emmy Award nominee known for her role as Abby Deveraux on the long-running daytime soap, “Days of Our Lives,” has joined the cast of Patrick Tovatt’s “Helper,” which will premiere June 30 at the Theater at the Henry Clay in Downtown Louisville. Miller is stepping back on stage after several years in television and independent film because she believes in the message of Tovatt’s play, which deals with the circumstances leading up to gun violence.

Set in a coffee shop in Helper, Utah, a chance encounter turns deadly as festering cultural resentments, racism, and the stresses of single parenthood collide and erupt in sudden, inexplicable gun violence. Three lives and an entire community are devastated in its wake as the past meets the present, and an uncertain future awaits in this moving new play.

“It’s a powerful and brilliant piece,” says Miller. “I’m playing a pregnant mother who has to make split-second choices with dire consequences. The issues raised in this play reflect what’s happening in society today, and we all need to face those issues head on.”

Directed by Steve Woodring with a set design by Emmy winner David Weller, the cast includes veteran actor Matt Orme and former Producing Artistic Director of Bunbury Theatre, Juergen Tossmann. Tossmann joined Tovatt, Woodring, and Orme to create a new theater company called 1NE-OFF Productions.

“Collectively, we have over 200 years of experience in the theater, and we thought the name fitting, since it may very well be the last play we produce,” says Woodring.

“We’re excited to be partnering with Bunbury Theatre, our company's fiscal sponsor, and that allows us to raise taxdeductible donations, with a portion of ticket sales going to community organizations,” says Orme. “We’re holding community engagement sessions after each performance, which will feature Louisvillians who are actively working to stop gun violence.”

The History Of Gun Violence

Tovatt was raised on the mythology of the American West. He can trace his ancestral line through Helper, Utah, in the latter 19th century.

“I have had many ‘awakenings’ in my 82 years, among them that our national fixation conflating freedom with firearms is not only historically bogus but, as every newscast confirms, deadly,” he says.

In 1791, as a concession to slave-holding former colonies, the Second Amendment guaranteed rising abolitionist sentiment would not disarm slave patrols, adds

Tovatt. Fear of slave rebellion reigned in the South. Guns were expensive, relatively unreliable, and scarce.

“The ‘arms’ of the Second Amendment meant flintlock muskets but also swords, cudgels, and pikes — not AR-15s or Glocks,” Tovatt says.

“How we came to imagine the settlement of the country as a contest between stoic lawmen and pistol-packin’ outlaws is Hollywood, not fact,” he continues.

“Among the first acts of a frontier town’s civic governance was a gun control ordinance.” In fact, virtually every town in the Old West had a “no guns in town” ordinance.

“We once had a sane, civilized attitude toward instruments of death,” says Tovatt. “We have lost our way through pernicious mythology, the greed of the armaments trade, and the complete perversion of the Second Amendment. We suffer for it every single day.”

“In ‘Helper,’ we offer a play that impacts every one of us. Gun violence is all too real,” says Tossmann. “To be clear, Patrick Tovatt has crafted a play about guns, without the trappings of ‘gunplay.’ No gunshots, no bullets, no Hollywood glorification, only consequences that offer up questions.”

For those who miss Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, “Helper” aims to fill that void. The production opens June 30 and runs Thursdays through Sundays through July 16.

More information and tickets can be found at Bunburytheatre.org