The Fisherman’s Daughters

WRITING THE FISHERMAN’S DAUGHTERS

Katie Dahl, Playwright & Composer

Thirty years ago this summer, my grandparents, my mom, and I tramped down a trail through the Peninsula State Park cedars to the Northern Sky amphitheater for the first time. I was eight.

I didn’t know it then, but when I sat my eight-year-old self down on one of those hard wooden benches (no seat cushions back then!), a little root planted itself. The fact that decades later I became a Northern Sky playwright feels both as natural and as miraculous as any woodland flower.

Other musical theater writers grew up revering Sondheim; I didn’t know who he was. The theater writers I grew up revering were James Kaplan, James Valcq, Doc Heide, and Fred Alley. And the stories and songs they wrote took place on the peninsula where my family had been living for 150 years. I learned from them the beauty of clear-eyed, heart-filled songs and the music that lies in even the most mundane small-town Door County interactions.

And so it makes all kinds of sense that my latest play is set against the backdrop of the creation of the very state park where that playwright root planted itself thirty years ago. The Fisherman’s Daughters tells the story of two sisters trying to heal their ruptured relationship and trying to stop the state of Wisconsin from turning their family homestead into—you guessed it—Peninsula State Park.

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After Victory Farm (the show I co-wrote with Emilie Coulson and James Valcq) closed following its second run in 2013, I felt theatrically antsy. It’s a wonderful feeling to have a show brought to life onstage and viewed by audiences, wonderful enough to almost make you forget all the time and angst you put into the show in the first place—six years’ gestation in the case of Victory Farm, and now eight in the case of The Fisherman’s Daughters.

So I went on the lookout for a story to write. In a fit of impatient desire for inspiration, I drove to Peninsula Bookman (located along the Fish Creek main drag, a spot that would turn out to be central to my show) and bought a copy of Fish Creek Voices, a collection of oral histories published in 1990. On page 32, I read a personal account from the book’s editor, Edward Schreiber: “Two very interesting spinster sisters lived quite spartanly in an old house in the park, high upon an escarpment facing the waters of Green Bay. Their names were Ella and Vida Weborg. I used to deliver groceries to their home, sometimes having to climb up the icy hill with a fifty-pound sack of flour or a five-gallon can of coal oil (kerosene) for their lamps and oil stove.”

On the bottom of the page, I wrote: “The Spinster Sisters of Peninsula State Park???” and thus began the journey of The Fisherman’s Daughters. Three of the four characters—two sisters and their delivery boy—were conceived in that very paragraph.

When I read that the Weborg sisters had fought the state’s attempt to assimilate their family homestead into the nascent Peninsula State Park, and also that Ella Weborg liked to walk downtown for seemingly no reason, wearing a man’s coat and wheedling folks into giving her a ride home, I knew I had enough for a great story—though it would be three years before I finished my first full draft.

The Fisherman’s Daughters is not an account, factual or otherwise, of the Weborg sisters’ life—it is entirely a fiction, an act of wild imagination. Because I neither wanted to weight my imagination down with reality nor to represent the lives of these real-life women inaccurately, I gave the two sisters in my story new names: Sarah and Nora Peterson. I gave Nora a life in Chicago (though she travels home to Fish Creek at the beginning of the play). I called their delivery boy Charlie, and I invented a government employee, John Murphy, and a state department for him to work in: The Department of Land Preservation. And I wrote about the lives I imagined for them.

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The Fisherman’s Daughters is story about love: the love two sisters share for one another, the love they share for the place where they live, and (on a meta-level) my love of storytelling that took root in that same place. And like any good love story, all these relationships are full of complexity and frustration and longing.

Looking back, the creation of Peninsula State Park seems to me so clearly a public good—yet I also empathize entirely with two sisters who would vehemently fight not to have their beloved home swept up into it. The public good is fine and dandy until it creates a private loss, at which point we have to reckon with the gap that creates.

In some ways, The Fisherman’s Daughters is about the difference between the kind of love we’re best able to perceive with the benefit of distance, chronological or geographical, and that which we’re better able to see close up. As we emerge from a year of pandemic, I feel more keenly than ever Sarah and Nora’s loneliness, the disparity between what’s good for many and what’s good for a few, and the precious gift of space and nature we’ve been given here in Door County.

KATIE DAHL

Playwright / Composer / Lyricist

Katie is a playwright and nationally touring singersongwriter who makes her year-round home in Baileys Harbor. Katie is known to Northern Sky audiences for her musical Victory Farm (co-written with Emilie Coulson and James Valcq), her singing and baking on The Jeff & Katie Show, and her frequent appearances on stages throughout Door County and beyond. Katie’s latest album, Wildwood, spent several months near the top of the national folk radio charts, and esteemed songwriter Dar Williams has called Katie’s work “the very best kind of songwriting.” You can learn more about Katie’s music at katiedahlmusic. com. Katie spent her pandemic performing Curbside Song Dropoffs in her bright blue “Songmobile” van, writing plays, hanging out with her husband, Rich, and five-year-oldson, Guthrie, and wrangling a new puppy. This one’s for Neen.

ALEX CAMPEA

Performer

Alex cannot express how much it means to him to be back on the stage at Northern Sky. After two years away, he’s home and there is no place he’d rather be!! Since his last stage performance, Alex moved back to Chicago, did a summer of commuting to work at Blue Horse (and get his yearly Door County fix), and found another performing home with Facebook group “Zooming the Movies,” where he has been able to perform movie scripts over Zoom. Some favorite COVID-era roles include: Luke Skywalker (Return of the Jedi), Lord Voldemort (HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone), Ed Wood (Ed Wood), King George (Hamilton), The Master (Buffy), and C-3PO (Verily, A New Hope). Catch him at Blue Horse in Fish Creek for a good cup of coffee! Many thanks to friends, family, patrons, and of course Neen Rock, without whom none of us would be here. Enjoy the show and welcome back!

CHASE STOEGER

Performer

Going on fifteen years Chase couldn’t be happier returning to the stage at Northern Sky Theater! After a year of silly online videos and crocheting hats, he’s ready to walk the planks out in the woods. Some favorite roles at Northern Sky include Jim Olson in Doctor! Doctor!, Samuel Clemens in Life on the Mississippi, Rufus in Fishing for the Moon, Will Hannah in Main-Travelled Roads, and Moonlight in Lumberjacks in Love. Thank you to everyone for supporting us through this challenging year and we are so glad you can join us out in the woods and in our new Gould Theater!

KELLY DOHERTY

Performer

Kelly is overjoyed to be returning to the stage in Pen Park. This is her sixth season with Northern Sky, having first appeared onstage during the 2015 season and most recently appearing in the inaugural production in the Gould Theater, Dad’s Season Tickets. Kelly moved to Milwaukee after graduating with a BFA in Theater Performance from UW-Whitewater. She has appeared with Forward Theater, Milwaukee Chamber Theater, Next Act Theater, and First Stage Theater, to name a few. Favorite roles include Trunchbull (Matilda), Gangster 2 (Kiss Me Kate), Bodey (Lovely Sunday for Creve Ceouer), and Williamina (Silent Sky). As always, love and gratitude to her parents who have attended every single one of her shows and managed to stay awake through 99% of them. And Mikaela is right. Kelly is the funny one.

EVA NIMMER

Performer

Eva is an actor, writer, and musician whose work has been featured on the Northern Sky stage since 2013. Having performed in several original musicals, Eva also co-authored Dairy Heirs in 2018, along with collaborators Joel Kopischke and Alissa Rhode. Other selected Wisconsin stage credits include: Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Next Act Theatre, Third Avenue Playhouse, Milwaukee Opera Theatre, Children’s Theater of Madison, and Forward Theater Company, where Eva’s monologue, To the Young in Heart, will premiere in their Monologue Festival, Within These Walls: Stories of Home, this June 24-27. Eva is so glad to be back in Door County. Thanks for supporting live theatre!

Alex Campea and Jeff Herbst sing "Look at That" from the "The Fisherman's Daughters" on the Jeff and Katie show last August.

A Note from the Author of The Fisherman’s Daughters

I couldn’t have written The Fisherman’s Daughters without the books Fish Creek Voices, edited by Edward Schreiber, and Door County’s Emerald Treasure, by William H. Tishler. Many individuals also helped to shape The Fisherman’s Daughters, especially the entire creative team you see listed in the playbill. A few contributors you won’t see on the company list include Anna Cline, Carla Dahl, Jacinda Duffin, Laurie Flanigan Hegge, Rich Higdon, Susan Jaret McKinstry, Jeremy Lindsay, and James Valcq, as well as our deeply missed friend and colleague Neen Rock.

– Katie Dahl

Book, Music & Lyrics by Katie Dahl

Director Molly Rhode

Music Director Alissa Rhode

Stage Manager Shawn Galligan*

Lighting Designer James Balistreri

Sound Designer Ben Werner

Costume Coordinator Dan Klarer

Scenic Elements Lisa Schlenker

Vocal Arrangements Alissa Rhode

Orchestrations Dennis Keith Johnson, John Lewis, and Andrew Crowe

Fish Creek, Wisconsin. 1908.Cast of Characters

Sarah: Kelly Doherty*

Nora: Eva Nimmer*

Charlie: Chase Stoeger

John: Alex Campea

Musicians: Andrew Crowe | Dennis Keith Johnson | John Lewis

*Member of Actors’ Equity Association, the union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.

The Fisherman’s Daughters is sponsored by:

Door County Medical Center, Door County Candle CompanyMain Street Market, White Gull Inn