As a child, Ben Steinfeld would trudge through a snowy Washington Street to the Pierce School alongside his father, who was walking to work at the Brookline Public Library.
Now 47, and a father himself, Steinfeld said he has begun to relive those childhood memories from the other side — as a parent.
Steinfeld is known for his work on Broadway as an actor, in productions such as “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” “Cyrano de Bergerac” and others. He’s also a musician, director, teacher and, most recently, a musical playwright.
His new musical “Twelve Kinds of Ice ,” based on Ellen Bryan Obed’s book of the same name, will premiere Oct. 13 at Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, the largest theater for young audiences in North America. The show will run until Nov. 22.
Almost 10 years ago, Steinfeld’s wife Kate Hewitt, then a school librarian, returned to their Providence, Rhode Island, home with Obed’s “Twelve Kinds of Ice.” As Steinfeld read the 20 vignettes about a father and daughter’s nostalgic winter in Maine to his son as a bedtime story, he began to think about an adaptation.
“It felt to me right away like a sort of New England story,” Steinfeld said. “Having grown up in Brookline, I felt very sort of resonant with some of what was being described.”
Steinfeld was born in New York City, but raised in Brookline from age 5 to 13 until his family relocated to Los Angeles. He now lives with his wife and son in Providence.
When Steinfeld decided to create a musical adaptation of Obed’s book, he contacted her to obtain permission. In his conversations with her, Steinfeld said he discovered that Obed had wanted to write about her Maine winters growing up, but didn’t know how until her father died and the story “just came out of her,” he said.
The musical follows novelist Ellen, who is struggling to write an end to her latest story. She seeks help in the audience, fluttering between narrating her story and falling back into memories of wintertime with her father, like building a backyard ice rink.
Artwork from the original book “Twelve Kinds of Ice” by Ellen Bryan Obed, illustrated by Barbara McClintock.
Played by the same actor, Katherine Fried, Ellen’s adult self relives her 10-year-old memories, mirroring Steinfeld’s own experience with living new moments with his son.
In one scene, Steinfeld noted, Ellen trips and falls while ice skating “in the way a grown-up would” and realizes how long it’s been since she felt that childlike freedom.
“Those memories of the wind in your hair or of the way your breath looked on the window,” Steinfeld recalled. “It’s so indelible.”
After Steinfeld finished the musical five years ago, he sent a draft to his longtime friend from graduate school, Rick Dildine, who is now the artistic director of Children’s Theatre Company. Intending to receive notes from Dildine, simply picked up the musical to be produced at the theater.
“When I read it and started doing research on it, I knew it was perfect for Minnesota,” Dildine said. “The tradition of turning your backyard into an ice rink … here in the north, that is not uncommon.”
With only two cast members, one musician and a simple set, “Twelve Kinds of Ice” requires the audience to use its imagination throughout.
“When we look at ice, we could just be seeing one version of ice, but they’ve broken it down into this beautiful investigation,” Fried said. “A lot of the show is asking people to engage their imagination and to investigate and explore the world around them.”
Dildine said seeing a show at the Children’s Theatre, the only theater dedicated to young people to win the Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, is “electric.” When a character speaks directly to the young audience, they respond. They laugh. They react.
“Our audiences have not developed cynicism, and they don’t know what a rhetorical question is either,” he said.
In every production he’s worked on, from Shakespeare to contemporary writer Simon Rich, Steinfeld said, he’s found himself trying to incorporate multigenerational audiences – both a “childlike sense of joy and imagination” and “adult levels of sophistication and virtuosity,” he said.
In writing the musical, Steinfeld said he uncovered forgotten childhood memories, including his wintertime walks to school with his father as well as family cross-country skiing trips and an ice skating birthday party.
Even for Fried, working through her character surfaced memories of sailing paper boats through her home’s gutters with her father on especially rainy days.
“I think on some level, every show reminds us of things that we forgot we already knew,” Steinfeld said. “And that’s kind of what art does.”
But on another level, Steinfeld said, the musical touches on the many layers of memory. As a parent, reliving experiences with them and trying to figure out how to use those experiences to teach, as a child still yourself who may have lost a parent, and as a person still living in that moment.
“My hope is that it makes people want to hug somebody,” he said. “And that they have a chance to take a deep breath and remember the sense of awe and wonder that childhood allows.”
This story is part of a partnership between Brookline.News and the Boston University Department of Journalism’s Newsroom program