Sometimes, Jerry Casper feels like he lived through the Dust Bowl years.
Casper, of course, isn't old enough to have been around in the 1930s, but he did grow up in Kansas, which experienced some of the worst conditions of the Dust Bowl.
"My father and grandfather lived through it," Casper said. "As a kid, I was hearing all about it."
Casper has taken those stories and combined them with his own research to create "Faces of the Dust," a one-man play to be presented Friday through Sunday on the lobby stage at Rochester Civic Theatre. The play is part of the annual Rochester Reads program.
The Rochester Reads book this year is Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time," about the Dust Bowl years. In recent years, Casper, has written and produced an original play based on the Rochester Reads book at Rochester Community & Technical College, where he is director of theater.
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This year, though, he was unable to secure rights to adapt Egan's book for the stage. So, he said, "I decided to develop my own piece based on my own research."
And since he was already committed to producing "The Rabbit Hole" with a student cast this month at RCTC, Casper opted for a one-person show about the Dust Bowl years.
"This way, I don't let Rochester Reads down and I can rehearse in my basement at 2 in the morning if I have to," he said.
Casper's play is built around three characters. "They're entirely fictional," he said. "I just took tiny pieces of a lot of stories and combined them."
One of the characters is a Volga German (Germans who had settled in Russia before migrating to the American Midwest) in tribute to Casper's ethnic heritage. "I can do that Volga-German accent because I grew up with it," he said.
