‘Counting on Grace’

A 12-year-old girl leaned on the spools of a cotton mill in North Pownal, her stern and strong face marred with dirt.

The year was 1910.

A man named Lewis Hine, tasked with investigating child labor and gathering evidence of it for the National Child Labor Committee from behind a bulky camera lens, stumbled upon the girl, Adeline “Addie” M. Card LaVigne.

He asked the mill’s manager to take a photo of the machinery with a different agenda in mind — capturing the image of hardworking Addie instead.

LaVigne was one of roughly 5,000 images Hine captured of children working in factories, mills and farms for two decades, from the early 1900s through 1920, as a schoolteacher turned investigator for the Committee.

Founded in 1904, the Committee’s mission was to expose the more than 2 million child workers under the age of 15 nationwide who were deprived of normal childhoods because they had to support their families by working low-wage factory jobs following the Civil War.

Hine’s image of Addie and other child workers from across the country exposed more than an epidemic of kids working in hazardous and unhealthy conditions — it was the reflection of an America where an entire generation was on the verge of losing the opportunity to get an education because they were forced to help make ends meet.

Mount St. Joseph Academy senior Alessandra Hodulik says she’ll never know what it really feels like to be deprived of the opportunity to go to school.

But by portraying Addie in numerous play rehearsals since September and in a stage performance this weekend, Hodulik said she’s going to give it a try.

“I had to go from rehearsing the life of a girl that barely gets three meals a day, to my life where three meals a days is guaranteed and it’s something I don’t focus on because it’s always been there,” Hodulik said Wednesday.

“Despite everything she’s denied she’s able to maintain as a strong-willed person whose focus is bettering herself.”

Hodulik is one of 23 students from MSJ and Christ the King who will perform an adaptation of Elizabeth’s Winthrop’s novel “Counting on Grace,” a story inspired by Addie’s photo, on a thrust stage in the Jennifer Bagley Theater deep inside Mount St. Joseph Academy on Friday and Saturday.

MSJ’s Shoestring Company and Drama Director Jennifer Bagley are hoping to expose Addie’s story, Hine’s images and Winthrop’s meaningful written interruption, by performing a dramatic adaptation of “Counting on Grace” for members of the Rutland area community to see.

It’s a historic Vermont tale worth re-telling, with a fictionalized and hopeful happy ending, said Bagley, the school’s drama teacher for 13 years.

Bagley, who read Winthrop’s book this summer and was inspired to adapt its themes into a play for the MSJ stage, said this show carries a greater meaning for her student-actors because it’s about Vermont and it’s real.

From Pownal to Manchester to Winooski, women and children working tirelessly in the mills was the norm in Vermont in the early 1900s.

“I first exposed students to Hine’s photos and asked them what they thought,” Bagley said.

Their responses: “dreary,” “shocking,” “melancholy,” “sad,” and “depressed.”

From that day forward, student-actors made Addie (renamed Grace Forcier by Winthrop) their very own Anne Frank.

“Based off those pictures and looking at the script and interrupting Hine’s role toward Grace and his compassion toward her,” is how MSJ junior Tyler Sanborn said he embraced the role of photographer, activist and investigator, Lewis Hine.

An audience is welcomed to see the culmination of the work by Bagley and the students — from MSJ’s realistic interruptions of Hine’s photographs down to the last button on Addie’s dirty smock to spinners in the cotton mill.

The Shoestring Company has performed a number of notable plays including “Robin Hood,” “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Complete History of America,” through the years and “Counting on Grace,” is sure to be another memorable drama, possibly even one for the history books, Bagley said.

“Counting on Grace” reflects the struggle and triumph of Addie and other child mill workers like her, real-life stories ultimately leading to child labor being reduced then abolished in America.

“These are interesting people and you want to give kids characters they can believe in,” Bagley said, flanked by nearly duplicate images of her present-day students in costume and photos of child laborers.

“It’s also about universal themes we deal with everyday — loyalty and how to find yourself, how to hang onto your identity and the practicality of education.”

Admission to all three MSJ “Counting on Grace” performances this weekend is free.

Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with a 2 p.m. matinee Saturday. There will be an opportunity to offer freewill donations to local charities.

Contact Cristina Kumka@cristina.kumka@rutlandherald.com.