Time to Draw Near and Listen

“Bring tissues,” advises Georgia Case, an organizer and board member with San Juan Capistrano’s Once Upon a Story storytelling festival.

Taking place Friday night and all day Saturday, the 11th annual spoken word event is designed to touch the heart, soul and mind in a variety of ways.

“You laugh, you cry, you see every possible human reaction at the festival,” Case says.

Once Upon a Story will offer various storytelling presentations featuring professional raconteurs, workshops and an informal story swap session for amateurs and semi-professionals.

Even those Once Upon a Story sessions geared for younger children can strike a poignant, nostalgic chord among adults. Donald Davis, who will be one of the principal performers this weekend, is known for weaving elaborate stories with wide appeal.

“Donald has a wonderful story about a family vacation he took as a child,” Case says. “It was this epic journey in a car. I’m sure a lot of us adults experienced that when we were kids. It’s about the trials and tribulations [of such a vacation]. It’s funny and sad. It made me think about the past and future.”

Antonio Sacre, who will be performing at Once Upon a Story for the third time, says the festival is unusual in its ability to serve up quality performers in a small setting. Performances take place in a 700-seat tent at San Juan Capistrano’s Historic Town Center Park.

“It’s an incredibly intimate experience,” Sacre says. “It’s how storytelling is meant to be--which is, it should feel like you’re at someone’s house listening to them tell stories. Some of the huge festivals sometimes have thousands of people in the tent and you feel like you’re in a concert hall. But unlike some of the small festivals, the San Juan Capistrano festival also gets the top tellers in the country. So it combines the best of the large festivals by bringing in the biggest names, but also the best of the smaller festivals by making it intimate.”

The idea for creating a storytelling festival in Orange County first came to Melba Jones 12 years ago when she attended the celebrated National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tenn.

At the time an elementary school librarian in the Saddleback Valley School District, the Tennessee native had gone to the Jonesborough event to learn about storytelling skills that would help get her students excited about reading.

In 1990, Once Upon a Story was launched in San Juan Capistrano, a location Jones chose because it possessed the same type of unspoiled, small community appeal as Jonesborough.

There’s an added sense of poignancy this year because Jones died of cancer last June.

Bill Harley, a nationally acclaimed family storyteller who will perform at Once Upon a Story, believes the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 may also change the way some stories are told this weekend.

“As a culture, we’re kind of sarcastic and cynical,” Harley says. “I have some of that in my work. I use that as humor. But that stuff doesn’t work right now. We have to be really clear and sincere in what we’re saying. Not to say we can’t be funny, because to some extent humor is one of the things that heals people.”

Many of Harley’s stories are straight monologues. But he also uses music to help tell his detailed tales of growing up in the Midwest. For example, “The Great Sled Race” is a 13-minute story that he presents within a talking blues format and with the accompaniment of his guitar. The song finds Harley and his childhood buddy colliding with the school principal’s rather large wife while sledding down a mammoth hill. The outcome is comically outrageous.

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Popular African American storyteller Diane Ferlatte, Chinese American yarn weaver Clara Yen and the bilingual Sacre will bring an ethnic flair to the festival.

The 33-year-old Sacre was born in Boston to a Spanish-speaking Cuban father and an Irish American mother. He stopped speaking Spanish as a young child after classmates teased him for using the language. He took it up again as a teenager at the behest of his grandmother.

“One story I tell is called ‘The Barking Mouse,”’ Sacre says. “There’s a family of mice that is threatened by a cat. The mom starts barking at the cat. The cat thinks it’s a dog so the cat runs away. The mom says to her kids, ‘You see, kids, it pays to speak another language.’ That’s a little joke my grandmother told me many, many times.

In addition to the free story swap session, three workshops will be held during the day Saturday. Sacre will talk about using two languages in storytelling. Davis will give instruction on how to develop original stories. Marilyn McPhie will share ways that props can be utilized in storytelling.

In the past, teachers, librarians, ministers and even trial lawyers have found such workshops helpful in improving their professional skills.

Some storytelling sessions will be geared more for young children, while a few late-night performances will be directed more toward teens and adults. But the entire festival is clearly family oriented. It’s a profanity-free event where politically doctrinaire and overtly evangelical performances are discouraged.

The last thing Harley wants to do in his stories is preach to kids about how they should behave.

“I do want to encourage kids to be responsible, thoughtful and considerate,” Harley says. “But I feel one of the major things I do is affirm what their lives are like. That’s oftentimes a step we don’t take with our kids because we’re so intent on them behaving a certain way. If you can acknowledge that experience, it’s easier to get to that next place [of teaching them right from wrong]. Story isn’t about what you should do. It’s about what happened to somebody else and what you draw from that experience.”

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Once Upon a Story featuring Donald Davis, Bill Harley, Antonio Sacre, Diane Ferlatte, Clara Yen, Marilyn McPhie and Angela Lloyd, Historic Town Center Park, 31806 El Camino Real and Camino Real Playhouse, 31776 El Camino Real, San Juan Capistrano. Friday, 7:30-10 p.m. $7-$12; 60 and older, $6-$10; ages 7-15, $4-$5. Saturday, 8:45 a.m.-10:15 p.m. (There will be a lunch break between 12:15 and 2 p.m. and a dinner break between 4:45 and 7 p.m.) $30; 60 and older, $25; ages 7-15, $10. Individual tickets for specific performances and workshops are also available. Call for details. (949) 493-5911 or (949) 768-1916.