It’s a rehearsal for the Haunted Ruins show at Valley of the Moon in Tucson, Arizona, just in time for Halloween. The place is lit with faerie lights. We travel to Old Stump, the Spider Tree, the Magic Room, the Rabbit Hole, the Faerie Queen Grotto, and various other venues throughout the park. All are scenes in the seven-act play. The actors are still reading their lines, each role having several players. All are needed, because the tour route can have as many simultaneous performances as there are scenes, each tour leaving the gate as the last moves on in a progressive theatrical experience.
The place is built for children, full of low overheads and winding passageways like the Rabbit Hole tunnel that leads into a small stone garden with a pond, the Faerie Queen Grotto. Tonight, the grotto is an acting school led by Randy Van Nostrand, the president of Valley of the Moon mylvhn, and Travis Deyoe, an engineering student at the University of Arizona. They remind us to always face the audience, at least approximately, unless for effect. Frank, the Frankenstein monster, being not very bright, needs to be realigned occasionally by his boss, Count Dracula. Oh yes, and speak from the diaphragm, using your outside voice, so people can hear you.
The play’s faerie queen renders a song as a benediction for the monsters’ quest. She sings in a high, lilting child’s voice about a vampire king, a father’s wrath, and magic powers. The words are in the script, but the tune is an improvisation that draws applause from her fellow actors. Few adults would have the raw courage to attempt that, but this is a child, a professional explorer.
The children and young adults who volunteer at Valley of the Moon have acquired magnificent problem-solving skills. They cooperate to overcome deficiencies in costuming and props. They compensate for absent cast members, learning new lines in 20 minutes, if need be, and making stuff up if they forget. They flit through the darkness like wraiths between scenes if they need a double at the next show. They stay in character always, like actors at a Renaissance faire.
The Valley of the Moon feels like a new idea, but it is old. Its creator gave free shows for children through the Great Depression and through Word War II, and on, until his failing health forced him to close his two-and-a-half-acre home and domain. Then, in 1967, an odd thing happened. A number of students at the regional high school discovered, as if in an episode of the Twilight Zone, that they were all experiencing the same dream. Realizing that there had to be a reason for it, they deduced that what they really had in common was a shared childhood memory. They became the first volunteers and board members of a restored Valley of the Moon.
Today’s Valley of the Moon is two-and-a-half Tucson, Arizona acres of outdoor fantasy adventure in the manner of Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allen Poe. Here there be pirates and lost boys, fantastical creatures made of stone and imagination, magical rooms, fantasy crossroads, rabbit holes, and still-beating hearts.