In October I had the pleasure of doing a phone interview with the creators of "Towle's Hill" a monlogue produced by San Francisco's Marsh Theater and Gundlach Bundschu, a winery in Sonoma Valley, CA. On the phone was the show's director and artist in residence at the Marsh, David Ford, the writer and performer, Mark Kenwood, and the Marsh's artistic director and founder, Stephanie Weisman.

 

 

 

"Towles Hill”, as most of the Marsh’s productions, is a live monologue performed in an intimate settings. "Towle's" let even more barriers down by featuring a healthy wine tasting after the show (and sometimes beforehand, too.) I saw the show on the Marsh's SF stage in August, after it had traveled to 10 cities on a rock n' roll bus and had a lovely show on at the winery itself. From what I understand, Gundlach wanted to do something in the arts to celebrate its 25th anniversary and saw a traveling performance of its history as a funky way to spread their brand, do honor to their tradition, and get the attention of their reps, distributors, and colleagues. Untravel is considering doing wine and food tours and this combination of history, entertaiment, and site-based storytelling is a good lesson for us.

David is a clear-headed monologue master, who told me his initial instinct with this project, as with most performances, was to pinpoint something in the Gunlach history that could create stakes for the performance. Him and Mark discovered in long talks with the Bundschu family, that grandfather Towle Bundschu had been very close to selling off the winery in the 1970’s.

 

From this moment of high stakes, the history then flows out naturally from a worried mind and a decision hangs heavy over the rest of the performance. Unlike most mobile narratives we have taken and worked on, this idea of something personal at stake driving the recounting of history is compelling.

The other key ingredient was finding a way to portray Towle who has been dead for over 20 years. Luckily, as Mark explained to me, Towles son, Jeff, was like a mini-Towle:

 

 

And besides lenghty interviews and research into family albums (and drinking songs!) Mark and David found that touring the winery itself, elicited great, and even forgotten family tales, one of which became central to pulling the audience closer to this wine-making family.

 

I love when interviewees conspire with space to tell you something, on site, in the moment that they are just realizing, almost chaneling the ground beneath their feet. It happened one time with tha post-Katrina interview of a man who only realized 6 months after the story how improbable his path was through floodwaters to find a canoe he ended up rescuing 30 people with. Overall, Stephanie felt that this story of a wine-making family really tapped strongly into a California ethos of up-and-downs, family bonds, and magic in the soil.

 

“TH” is a great starting point for thinking about wine country tours. Family history is often the key thread to understanding winemakers' various approaches and relationship to the land. What stays in my mind about Towle's Hill and my own winery jaunt in Sonoma was how x-$Billion CA business came from some down home 70's funkiness. Spinning out from the 60's there was a generation that understood the value of experimention, the independence of farm life, and, possibly, the love of inebriation. How cool would it be to go back to the topsy-turvey Sonoma of the 70's through mobile media stories available in tasting rooms, on bike routes through fields, and through talks with some of the holdout nuts from the era? It could even be kind of underground, through small signs in tasting rooms that are tiny portals to this story thread. Maybe, for an instance, it let us all take a step back from the rules, elitism, and tasting fees Sonoma presents to the public, and take us to the tumble down wineries of the uncertain 70's...