The Laughter Tells the Tale

Storyteller Bill Harley had a tentful of kids enraptured Saturday in San Juan Capistrano. With changing facial expressions, whoops and whispers, he had them rolling in laughter with a morality tale filled with talking dragons, bicycles and bubbling glasses of orange juice.

The only people enjoying it more than the children, perhaps, were their parents, who were hollering and laughing right along.

In its 14th year, the Once Upon a Story storytelling festival took over San Juan Capistrano’s Historic Town Center Park on Friday and Saturday.

More than 1,000 people turned out over the two days of storytelling and workshops on the craft. Such festivals, storytellers and organizers say, are an opportunity for people to revisit a simpler time when people were captivated by lyrically told tales.

“It’s rare today to give people a chance to engage a story and to see it unfold before them,” said Jim Cogan, a storyteller and one of the event’s organizers.

“Storytellers are saying, ‘Hold on’ in a world that’s spinning faster and faster and where everything is fed to you on TV and in movies in two-second bites. ‘Here’s something different.’ ”

The weekend featured hours of “telling,” as enthusiasts call it, and instruction from five nationally known storytellers.

Only the Saturday morning session targeted young children; the rest of the calendar was filled with performances for older audiences that ran the gamut from hilarious to wrenching, from Connie Regan-Blake’s Appalachian-inspired tales to Willy Clafin’s absurd yarns told through his moose puppet, Maynard.

At a workshop in the Camino Real Playhouse, about 75 people listened as Blake offered advice on stage presence, fighting off nerves and keeping an audience’s attention.

Along with practical tips (biting your tongue produces saliva, if you run out mid-story), she implored novice tellers not to tear through a story too quickly and without pauses.

“A lot of a story,” she said, “is told in the silences.”

Lessons gave way to entertainment in the park as Clafin and Harley performed during the children’s hour.

“I was afraid they were only going to let the children in,” said Fran Murovitz, 69, who, along with her husband, Marvin, has attended the festival for 12 years.

Harley drew howls with his story of an impetuous young girl who ignored her brother’s warnings not to ride her new bicycle near the cave of a dreaded dragon. Harley changed voices effortlessly, leaning forward on his toes with eyes wide open for dramatic effect. Along with all the laughter, however, adults and kids alike nodded knowingly as the kind-hearted brother learned that the key to freeing his sister was by stopping to talk with a destitute woman whom others cruelly ignored.

It was a moral lesson on the rewards of kindness, told through stories in many cultures, Harley said afterward.

The popularity of small, regional events like San Juan Capistrano’s and the national storytelling festival in Tennessee that attracts more than 10,000 people each year, storytellers said, is rooted in a craving unfilled by mass media.

“It is a very compelling thing for one person to speak and another to listen,” Harley said.

“There is an intimacy and connection that does not happen with television or movies -- where everything is done for you. People come to hear us because, when they leave, they feel they have been fed in a different way.”