Actress Brings History To Life For Mullan Road Students

Julia Berg emigrated from Sweden to America in 1897.

She became a nurse, tending to the the sick and injured in logging camps and mining towns from Seattle to Roslyn, Wash.

In a starched black skirt and white apron, she told her story Monday to fourth-graders at Mullan Road Elementary.

But Berg is a fictional character whose story is a script and whose stiff nurse’s apron is costume.

Laura Hutchins, a 25-year-old actress, plays the Swedish woman whose family settled near Seattle at the turn of the century.

Hutchins is a member of Living Voices - 22 actors and actresses who have been bringing history to life for the past four years.

In the next few months, Hutchins will travel to Nevada, Colorado and Oklahoma, where she will repeat her performance to hundreds of school children. She will don three different costumes.

She will play Julia. She will play an Irish immigrant girl passing through Ellis Island, and a friend of Anne Frank’s.

The three scripts were written by Rachel Atkins and Michael McClinton, originators of Living Voices.

Hutchins’s fellow actors are a television and a videotape, specially produced by Living Voices to accompany her performance.

The lights are dimmed. The children watch transfixed.

Hutchins adopts a Swedish accent and buttons the tight cuffs on her blouse.

Julia begins by describing her father, who immigrated to America after hearing that “gold was as common as dirt.” The video echoes her description.

The camera lingers on the wilted photograph of a weary-looking man in a crumpled hat.

Julia explains that her father didn’t find gold, but trees and danger in the woods as a logger.

When Julia gushes about her first trip to the big city, Seattle, the photographs of crowded Seattle streets fill the screen.

This is the second year that fourth-grade teacher Judy Indorf has seen the performance.

“It’s such a different, intriguing kind of presentation,” Indorf said.

The presentation at Mullan Road was sponsored by the school’s Parent Teacher Organization. “It’s long-term learning, something they’ll remember for years,” said Paul Stone, principal of Mullan Road.

In the sixth-grade classes, Hutchins plays a friend of Anne Frank’s.

Jeff Hunter, a sixth-grade teacher, has students read a book about Frank, the Jewish teenager forced to hide from the Nazis during World War II.

“I got amazing stuff out of my kids last year,” Hunter said. “They’re fascinated and moved.”

From Hutchins’s performance students learned that in the 1910s Roslyn, Wash., was home to many blacks hired by mine owners to break a miners’ strike; that a black woman named Mary was denied entrance to a Seattle nursing school because of her race; and that Chinese immigrants, who helped build the railroads, could not bring their families to America after the government banned further Chinese immigration in 1913.

“I love what I do. I love history,” said Hutchins, who has been performing with Living Voices for a year.

“It’s exciting to see kids visibly affected by the performance,” Hutchins said.

“They let their guard down. They ask lots of questions.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo