Judith Kalaora Brings History To Life
BU Medical Educator Judith Kalaora’s One-Woman Plays Bring to Life Forgotten Figures from History
BU Medical Educator Judith Kalaora’s One-Woman Plays Bring to Life Forgotten Figures from History
In this video, Judith Kalaora talks about History At Play, her immersive educational performance troupe telling stories of influential, but often forgotten, historical figures. Included are scenes from Rendezvous with Rachel, her one-woman show about Rachel Revere, wife of Revolutionary War figure Paul Revere.
Judith Kalaora had just graduated from Syracuse University in 2006 with a joint degree, in acting and Spanish, and was living with her parents in Framingham, wondering how she’d make a living. While she was watching TV one night, she saw a commercial that would change her life.
“It was a PSA for Boston’s Freedom Trail, and the ad said, ‘Our talented cast of actors and historians will provide you with an entertaining and educational experience,’” Kalaora recalls.
She had a flashback to a third grade field trip to the Freedom Trail and remembered the costumed guide who’d led the tour. “I thought it was the coolest experience,” she says. She emailed her résumé to the Freedom Trail that night and got a call the next day inviting her to apply for a job.
Kalaora was cast as Deborah Sampson, the first woman to enlist, fight, and be honorably discharged from the American military. Sampson was a schoolteacher, and in 1782, she bound her chest, disguised herself as a man, and enlisted in the Continental Army’s Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, using the alias Robert Shurtleff. She served two years as a foot soldier, her identity remaining a secret until she became ill with a fever and a doctor reported her identity to her commanding officer.
Kalaora, who works part-time as a standardized patient medical educator at Boston University’s School of Medicine, where she instructs medical students in interviewing techniques and bedside manner, says portraying Sampson was life-changing. People would stop her after the tour to find out more about the Revolutionary War figure, and she began delving into various sources to learn more. In 2010, she wrote A Revolution of Her Own, an hour-long one-woman play she began performing at local senior centers and assisted-living facilities.
People began asking her which other historical figures she portrayed, so she set about researching notable, but often overlooked women in US history. “Suddenly I realized this wasn’t just one show I was going to do, this was a concept that people hadn’t seen before,” Kalaora says. “The world was handing me a great big message on a silver platter.”
That same year she founded History At Play and began performing her shows around New England, and later, across the country. She’s performed A Revolution of Her Own more than 2,000 times, including an off-Broadway run.
Today, Kalaora’s repertoire has grown to 13 shows, which she describes as immersive living history experiences. Among the characters she portrays: Rachel Revere, wife of Revolutionary War figure Paul Revere; Lucy Stone, a 19th-century suffragist and human rights activist and the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree; Annie Adams Fields, a 19th-century Boston-based author and philanthropist; Madam Sarah Langlee Hersey Derby, who helped endow Harvard Medical School and the first private school for boys and girls in New England; and Dolley Madison, wife of US President James Madison. Dolley Madison is credited with saving priceless artifacts when the British attacked Washington and set fire to the White House during the War of 1814.
Kalaora has recently taken on more bold-faced characters, like Hollywood actor Hedy Lamarr, an inventor who pioneered the technology that led to WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth; New Hampshire schoolteacher and astronaut Christa McAuliffe, who died in the space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986; and most recently, Princess Diana, which has become one of History At Play’s most popular programs. Venues range from schools and assisted living facilities to town halls and historic homes and museums.
Each program takes an average of a year and a half to put together. Kalaora begins with light research, which can take up to a year, followed by intensive primary source research. Only when she’s sure she has enough material for a script does she begin writing, leaving gaps to accommodate last-minute research. Then there are logistics to consider.
“We’re not a Broadway company, so we don’t come with 18 wheelers and cherry pickers,” Kalaora says. “We come in a cargo van with a hand truck. So we have to consider things like, can we transport the set to a specific venue? How many stairs will we have to navigate?”
Performances typically run about an hour, and are followed by Q&As with the audience. Kalaora first speaks as the character she’s portraying, then answers questions as herself, talking about the research she’s done preparing for her program.
History At Play today includes a number of other historical interpreters who perform, both in person and virtually, around the globe. The troupe is run by Kalaora and a small administrative staff. Among the ensemble offerings is A Downton Experience, a murder mystery spoof of PBS’ Emmy-winning Downton Abbey, where family patriarch Robert Crawley is found murdered. Kalaora created the piece, which relies on audience participation, several years ago. The cast moves around the room during a pre-performance cocktail hour, getting a feel for the guests and who would like to be part of the show.
“If they want to be involved, we dole out roles and they get little cue cards and props and whatnot,” she says. “It’s so much fun.”
But it’s the stories of accomplished women whose lives aren’t well known that Kalaora enjoys the most. A history buff since childhood, the actor says that it’s only when you look at these “lesser spoken-about figures…the people who were pushing the pages of history,” that you get a more complete sense of actual events.
Pivoting during the pandemic
Then it was 2019, which was turning out to be a banner year for History At Play. “The hustle seemed like it was finally over,” Kalaora says, noting that the company was getting up to three bookings a day and her show on Lucy Stone was in big demand as the nation marked the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. But in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.
“The world came crashing down,” she says. She realized that to save the company, she had to pivot quickly. Within a week, they had gone virtual. Kalaora started mounting 15-minute virtual excerpts from her various shows on Wednesday nights on Facebook Live, followed by a Q&A with the audience. The performances drew up to 1,000 viewers a week. Those were followed by an hour-long pay-per-view performance on Friday nights, where viewers paid a sliding scale, ranging from $5 to $25. These drew up to several hundred people—enough to keep History At Play afloat.
Going from live to virtual performances required some restaging. Kalaora would rehearse each program on camera and then watch the footage, adjusting lighting and camera angles as needed and making sure she and the other artists were positioned properly. “I wasn’t going to have people paying to see our programs and have a situation where someone had half of their face off camera for half of the show because they didn’t realize they weren’t in frame. I taped everything, and we watched everything before it launched.”
Audiences tuned in for the same reason Kalaora and the rest of the troupe did: to escape the grim reality of the pandemic. “It was all pure joy, pure entertainment, pure collaborative experience,” she says. “I started calling our subscribers our history makers.”
Today, the company does only about one virtual program a month, as the demand for live performances is back to pre-pandemic levels. “We’re sold out for the coming two months,” Kalaora says. “It’s a blessing. We responded well during the pandemic. It improved History At Play’s visibility, and new history lovers are finding us and booking performances.”
Using performance to help train medical students
When she’s not taking audiences back in time through History At Play, Kalaora works with MED students. As a standardized patient (a person trained to portray an actual patient), she helps students hone their skills interviewing people who are hospitalized. She’s given a packet of information in advance detailing her fictional medical history and current symptoms, along with a background that might include alcohol or tobacco use, for example, or sexual history. She memorizes it ahead of time, then goes into an exam room, where a medical student takes her present and past medical history. The room is outfitted with cameras and audio, and professors are watching the interaction on screens to see how their students do.
When the exam is complete, the student leaves the room and Kalaora fills out a checklist, marking off areas where there’s room for improvement. She then sits down with the medical student and goes over the checklist. She begins by asking, “How do you think that went?” and offers feedback based on how she felt as the patient. Oftentimes, students will use a lot of medical jargon, which can be intimidating and confusing for patients. Or they might inadvertently pass judgment if she tells them, for example, that she has a history of smoking. She works with them to encourage using more plainspoken language and to broach subjects like smoking or alcohol use in such a way that it won’t harm the rapport they’re trying to build with the patient.
Kalaora says that “for the most part, when we end, they look at me and say, ‘This has been so helpful. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your time, that you’ve done this to help us.’”
She recalls being greeted one day by a young woman in the medical school lobby. “She asked me if I worked as a standardized patient and when I told her yes, she said, ‘You were my standardized patient for my observation skills clinical exam, and I never forgot what you said to me after that exam. It’s made me a better medical student, and I know it will make me a better doctor.’”
Who would she most like to play?
Asked if there’s one real-life person she’d like to portray in the future, Kalaora has a surprising answer. “I wish I could do a play about my mother.” Her mom, Nancy (CAS’68), was active in local politics. By the time she was 23, she was serving directly under Boston Mayor Kevin White (Hon.’74) as acting manager of Brighton’s Little City Hall, one of several satellite city halls his administration launched to help constituents navigate issues like rent increases, littering, or finding jobs and preschools for their children.
Kalaora’s mother died 10 years ago, just shy of age 66, after an excruciating battle with cancer. The way her mother’s doctors handled her care still rankles. “She got sicker and sicker,” Kalaora recalls. “If the doctors had just had better training to really look and listen—not only to my mother, but to her family, who were her advocates, the people who were saying, ‘This isn’t working, this is making her worse,’—it would have been different.”
Her mother’s death, she says, is one of the reasons she continues to work with medical students.
“What we know now is totally different than what we thought we knew 20 years ago,” Kalaora says. “I can only hope that the work we’re doing today in historical and medical education will yield a healthier, happier, and more fortuitous future.
“Every day that I get out of bed, I am determined to make history.”
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