Cindy Pierce Brings “Keeping It Inn” to the Briggs Opera House
June 7-9
Cindy Pierce is an innkeeper, a sexuality educator, a writer, a speaker, and in her newest venture, a playwright and actor. Her one-woman show, Keeping It Inn, has been circulating throughout Vermont and neighboring states and will be coming home to the Upper Valley for a series of performances at Briggs Opera House in White River Junction, VT on June 7, 8, and 9.
In this 90-minute production, Pierce becomes a chronicler of stories about and told by her mother, Nancy Pierce, who together with her husband, Reg, left Greenwich, Connecticut in 1971, seven children in tow, to take over the ownership of what came to be known as Pierce’s Inn in Etna, New Hampshire. Cindy, the youngest child, says she was “marinated in storytelling growing up in my large extended family. . . As early as age 6 or 7, I knew I needed to start taking notes on some of the stories so I didn't forget them. I could tell some folks around me had selective memory.”
The process of writing Keeping It Inn appears to have both deep roots and a flash of serendipity. Asked why writing and acting in a play was her chosen medium for telling her mother’s story, Cindy wrote:
I have written a lot about my family and have a rough collection of stories that will one day be a book. The concept of playing my mother through the last six decades of her life came to me in a flash while meditating during a warm-up band at a Michael Franti concert at the Lebanon Opera House. That was in 2016ish when my mother was alive. I took notes for three years. She died in December 2019. When COVID-19 landed, I started writing the play. My main motivation was to share the depth of her character and life with our kids, nieces, and nephews, so her story wouldn't get lost.
Cindy Pierce is a kind of marvel at portraying her mother through several stages of her life, with a physicality that ages along with the character from one vignette to the next. (Cindy’s siblings and other family members agree that she nailed it, and say so in a brief video here.) Nancy Pierce appears as an adventurer who found Greenwich a little too confining, who seized the opportunity to run a ramshackle inn almost on a whim, sensing it would be a good thing to work with her husband and kids in close proximity. She’s irreverent and out-loud reflective, though the latter was not always the case. As entertaining as the performance is, Keeping It Inn is not a rom-com, “Cheaper by the Dozen” type of work aiming strictly for laughs. Every family, including the Pierces, has experienced trauma and pain, and they sometimes worked at “keeping it in.” Cindy shines a compassionate and deft light on a mother’s—and family’s—loss of beloved children.
The lives of women who were born in the 1920s are rarely documented or even considered interesting. As a playwright and performer of Keeping It Inn, it is clear that Cindy Pierce had a front-row seat watching her mother, Nancy Pierce break out of the conventional life expected of women her age and step into a whole new experience of becoming an innkeeper in New Hampshire.
There is an element of romance, however, because Nancy’s story is also the story of her and Reg, who married soon after meeting (plenty of chemistry, Nancy assures the audience), and continued on for more than 50 years through life’s ups and downs as spouses and parents, and most hilariously, as innkeepers. Reg was ever resourceful, his wife recounts, from his unique manner of sorting and categorizing towels to his managing to feed an inn filled with guests while a flood of water swirled through the dining room at their feet.
Keeping It Inn is written and performed by Cindy Pierce, developed and directed by Traci Mariano. Tickets are available here for performances on June 7, 8, and 9. Scroll down to find the desired date.
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And a note on the present state of Pierce’s Inn from Cindy Pierce: “My husband, Bruce Lingelbach, and I are the innkeepers (since 2002). He does most of the innkeeping these days, and I am more of his assistant because of my other work as a sexuality educator. We host group functions that include dining, retreats and/or lodging. It is a private inn, so overnight groups of 15-35 stay over and enjoy three delicious meals by Bruce.”
(Thanks to Diane Riman for the tip.)
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.