This weekend, for the first time since 2019, students from New Paltz High School will be able to perform their traditional fall semester non-musical play with naked faces (if you don’t count stage makeup as wearing something). “The kids have commented how great it is not to be masked, not to have to stand six feet away. They’re happy to be doing it,” says Nancy Owen, Drama Club advisor and director of Bethel Park Falls.
The play is a contemporary drama by Connecticut-based playwright Jason Pizzarello, who also wrote one of the skits in the comedy anthology that the high schoolers performed in the autumn of 2021, The Alibis. And it’s especially timely subject matter for a scenic small town that’s under pressure to build more housing, since the premise of Bethel Park Falls is that a much-used community park has been sold to a large corporation for commercial development. “The residents are facing a crisis,” explains NPHS junior Nicholas Kutzin. “The park that everyone loves is being taken down by the town.”
Kutzin, who coincidentally has a twin in real life, is portraying two characters in the play: Dusty, a homeless guitarist with mental health issues and his identical twin Cliff, a successful businessman whom Dusty hasn’t seen in years. The nine vignettes in Bethel Park Falls are structured around encounters in the park between pairs of people whose lives intersect in myriad ways. “They all impact one another,” says junior Kari O’Brien, who plays April, “a studious person who really focuses on school” and “doesn’t like wilderness” but is dating someone more outdoorsy.
In this play, says junior Willa Voorhis, “Every person has a struggle, but they’re not being judged by the person they’re with; they all have empathy.” Voorhis’ character Dawn is a serious runner who’s “awkwardly in love” with another runner who’s a regular park user: Sonny, played by Marco Todaro. The two haven’t yet paired up, but surreptitiously check each other out while running and stretching. “They’re kind of stalking each other,” Voorhis says.
The play opens with June, a blind birdwatcher played by Julia Demskie, recording birdcalls to use in her activism to keep the community park open. Senior Julia Crofton plays Fern, a retired clerk who has Alzheimer’s and wanders the park reading poetry. “My character brings the seasons and has a little moment with each character,” says Crofton. Indeed, the swift passage of the seasons serves as a sort of magical metaphor in the play, whose action ostensibly takes place in a single day in various places within the park.
Some of the characters are married couples, but their personal dramas overlap with other Bethel residents as well. Marla May Feeney plays Brooke, who works for M Corp, the corporation closing the park, and Ryan Hyland plays her husband Glenn, a sleep-deprived father of two. Max Reinking portrays Reed, a soldier who has long been away. In her first stage role at NPHS, ninth-grader Abbie Adams plays Reed’s wife Lily, a cop on maternity leave who bonds with Glenn over parenting strategies.
Eamonn Rynne plays Clay, the mayor responsible for letting M Corp take over the parkland, who has been having an affair with Brooke. Veda Keon plays Clay’s wife Holly, a teacher who expelled Gaia, one of her students, for cheating. Played by senior Jenna Triguero, the despondent Gaia, a daughter of immigrants, crosses paths with Ash, a fisherman who’s hopeless at fishing, played by junior Peter Dillehay. Rounding out the cast are junior Ana Kirsch as Hazel, “a park ranger about to lose her job” who once arrested Dusty, and Finnian Lochard as Garnet, an actuary whose “job is basically to overthink.”
“It’s interesting to see how this one place can affect so many people in different ways,” says Dillehay. Or, as the official synopsis of the play puts it, “Bethel Park Falls draws a group of complex, fascinating, funny people together into one poignant story about the spaces where communities connect.”
Bethel Park Falls will be performed in the New Paltz High School Auditorium at 130 South Putt Corners Road at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, November 10, 11 and 12. Tickets are general admission, and will be sold at the door for $10 for students and senior citizens and $12 for adults (cash or check only). In accordance with longstanding NPHS Drama Club tradition, Owen will announce what musical the students will be putting on next spring at the end of the opening-night performance this Thursday.
Join the family! 
