Two longtime Upper Valley performers are each bringing to the stage productions that are departures from their past work.

First, on Friday evening, Alan Haehnel opens My Ode to Joy — a performance of spoken-word poetry mixed with music — at Parish Players’ Eclipse Grange Theatre on Thetford Hill.

Then next Friday, Cindy Pierce brings Keeping It Inn — her one-woman show about her parents’ ownership of Pierce’s Inn in Etna — to Briggs Opera House in White River Junction.

Haehnel and Pierce are no strangers to Upper Valley audiences: The former is a regular at Parish Players and has written and/or directed countless plays at Hartford and Hanover high schools, where he taught English for more than three decades. The latter is perhaps best known for her solo comedic works, including Finding the Doorbell, her honest look at the awkwardness of sex.

Haehnel said he’s never brought such a personal work, poetry in particular, to an audience; Pierce said much the same thing, and she’s acting for the first time, embodying her late mother. As artists who are both on the gray side of 50, they’re both trafficking in the hard-won wisdom of having persevered while doing the work to see oneself clearly.

“I’m willing to admit what I don’t know,” Pierce said in an interview Monday. “The sooner you can admit what you don’t know, holy smokes, things just open up.”

His ‘Ode to Joy’

Having retired from teaching in 2021, Haehnel decided late last summer that he’d write a poem a day, starting roughly when the new school year did. He also recorded himself reading them, then posted the videos to Facebook and sent links to the Hartford Listserv.

He wasn’t able to keep up the practice as long as he’d wanted, but he got about 35 new poems out of it. “I didn’t want it to become a terrible task,” he said.

Kay Morton, another longtime Upper Valley actor and director, saw the videos and asked Haehnel if he’d be interested in shaping them into a Parish Players show. It fits with another mission he’s taken on: promoting poetry in the Valley.

Poetry comes off to some as flowery and unserious, to others as stern and impenetrable. Haehnel sees it as a mode of expression that’s endlessly variable, ranging from Shakespeare to rap. Multiple modes are on display in My Ode to Joy. Regardless of the style, Haehnel sees an art form that cuts through the small talk and gets to the heart of things.

The poems in My Ode don’t shy away from difficult themes. A former student, Emily Smith, set to music a poem of Haehnel’s dedicated to a friend who died of pancreatic cancer. Two of Haehnel’s children, Omega and Jake, will join him, Omega in person and later by video, and Jake by video.

The title poem mixes Beethoven and rap beats. “It asks the central question of, ‘Where do I belong in this art form?’ ” Haehnel said. He’s still not sure.

As he rehearsed Tuesday in the Eclipse Grange, he recited My Ode to Joy. “A particular drive lies within me / I lean on poetry / Rap has caught my soul.”

His hope, he said, is that the production, which runs about 110 minutes, sparks conversation — the kind of honest, freewheeling talk that seems in short supply.

“We have to be free to use conversation not just to say what we mean, but also to experiment with what we might mean,” Haehnel said. Like many who work in expressive media, he’s concerned that a word put wrong can lead to ostracism.

In the end, he’s in service to poetry.

“I would like to see it be more vibrant in the Upper Valley,” he said, with more live events, more poems spoken aloud. Maybe everyone has an ode to joy inside them.

My Ode to Joy is in production at Parish Players Jan. 13-15 and Jan. 20-22. The Friday and Saturday shows are at 7:30 p.m.; the Sunday shows at 2 p.m. General admission tickets are $20, $15 for seniors, $10 for students. For tickets, go to parishplayers.org.

All Inn the Family

Cindy Pierce grew up as the youngest of seven kids, and all of her siblings were like parents to her.

That was a help, because her parents, Reg and Nancy, were busy running Pierce’s Inn, which they purchased after moving to Etna from Greenwich, Conn., in 1971. Reg left behind a New York City advertising career.

Cindy wasn’t planning to do a show about her parents, but the inspiration for it hit her like a bolt of lightning, she said in a video about Keeping It Inn.

She took notes about the show while caring for her mother. It didn’t feel right to write it while she was alive, Pierce said.

“It felt disrespectful,” she said. “She was someone who might see that as making fun of her.”

Nancy Pierce died in December 2019 at age 93, and when the coronavirus pandemic started a few months later, Cindy Pierce was able to get down to work. Her mother’s voice had been changed by age and dementia, and after her death, Cindy could hear how her mother sounded in her 40s and 50s.

After getting the story down, she worked with Hanover playwright Marisa Smith to winnow it into a play and with Los Angeles-based director Traci Mariano to further shape it.

What she discovered was that the story was about “the cost of tamping down your emotions,” Pierce said.

Before Pierce was born, her parents suffered the deaths of two children within five months. First a baby boy born with an unformed heart and lungs died in December, then young Angus Pierce, who was thought to be getting over a case of the measles, died of the disease. He was not quite 4 years old.

Grieving is an uneven process, and years later, Nancy expressed that while she’d been able to process her own feelings in the long run, she hadn’t been able to help her children to do so, Pierce said.

“The rules in our family were you find the good, you find the positive,” she said. Pierce was not compliant with this attitude, she said, and her family evolved to be more open about their feelings.

But while grief is the thread that ties together Pierce’s portrayal of her mother from one decade to the next, the show also conjures her parents’ charms. Her father had a magical ability to draw guests’ vision to the romance of the inn, to make them believe they were about to have the time of their lives, which they then did.

It wasn’t clear that this show would see a wider audience. Pierce performed it at the inn around Thanksgiving for family and friends. The response next weekend will determine how much farther it goes.

“We’ll see if it resonates,” she said.

Keeping It Inn runs for three shows, Jan. 20-22, in Briggs Opera House in White River Junction. There’s a link to purchase tickets ($30) on Pierce’s website, cindy-pierce.com.

More homegrown theater

Mascoma Valley Regional High School hosts a public reading of Freedom Lost, a musical by composer David Wilson, who taught music and drama at Mascoma from 2000 to 2020.

The show, which Wilson calls a modern-day fairy tale, features a nine-piece orchestra and 15 actor/singers, some of them students, others members of the Upper Valley music community.

Admission to the 7 p.m. Saturday performance is free, but donations are welcome with all proceeds going toward Mascoma’s music and drama programs. For more information and a recorded preview of the show, go to freedomlostthemusical.com.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

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