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Writer puts a new spin on father's historical play

Rich Copley Herald-Leader Culture Columnist

Dad had already done this.

Holly Henson grew up being in productions of The Ephraim McDowell Story. Her father, Eben Henson, founder and longtime artistic director of Pioneer Playhouse, had written the play to dramatize the story of one of Danville's most famous citizens: the doctor who performed the first abdominal surgery in recorded history.

The play was a major part of Pioneer Playhouse history. In 1969, John Travolta, then 15 years old, appeared in a production of the play. When Eben Henson died in 2004, he was buried with a copy of the script.

Or was it the only script?

"That may have been a mistake on my part," Holly Henson said. "I put that script in his casket at the last minute thinking he always kept copies of everything."

The time had come to revisit Ephraim McDowell for a new century. With the 200th anniversary of his famous 1809 operation and the theater's 60th anniversary coinciding, the timing could not be better.

But when Henson went to write the script, she could find only an early draft of her father's play.

"Maybe, subconsciously, I didn't want to have it," said Henson, now the theater's artistic director.

Initially, she asked Danville-connected playwrights Elizabeth Orndorff and Catherine Bush to consider drafting a new Ephraim McDowell story, but each declined.

So Henson took on the project, keeping McDowell's story in the family, albeit with a really different take from her dad's.

"Dad's thing was manifest destiny," Henson said while eating lunch at the playhouse between rehearsals. "He had Ephraim McDowell knowing at 6 months old he was going to perform a great operation."

But in Holly Henson's The Infamous Ephraim, McDowell is far less confident — trying to live up to his father, stumbling into medical school, abandoning it before it's over and really struggling with whether to proceed with his historic procedure to remove an ovarian tumor.

In a first-act scene, Ephraim's friend Samuel Brown — who became a prominent figure at Transylvania University's medical school and helped bring the smallpox vaccine to Kentucky — brings in a cadaver for Ephraim to use for research, much to his disgust.

When it comes time for the historic operation, it's the patient, Greensburg resident Jane Todd Crawford, who helps talk McDowell into moving forward.

"He had people telling him that if she died, he could go to jail and lose everything," Henson said. "It was the faith of the patient that inspired him."

A patient's perspective is not surprising from Henson: She has been battling breast cancer for more than a year, first through alternative therapy and then surgery and chemotherapy.

Much of the script was written while she was being treated.

This is the third year in a row Pioneer Playhouse has presented a play about local history. In 2007, it commissioned A Jarful of Fireflies, Bush's play about the filming of the 1957 movie Raintree County in Danville. Last year, it presented Death by Darkness, Orndorff's award-winning play based on Charles Dickens' visit to Mammoth Cave. Orndorff has been commissioned to write another local history piece for next summer.

"I'm really proud of the work the theater has done the past three years, looking at local history," Henson said, "There are people who drive past the Ephraim McDowell House every day and have no idea what he did."

Though she wants to chronicle local history, Henson and some of the other playwrights have approached it with a sometimes skeptical and irreverent eye.

Henson's research into McDowell brought up questions: Why did he leave medical school in Scotland early? What about the implications that he started courting his wife when she was 11? And was he really the first abdominal surgeon?

"As far as the first to ever successfully perform abdominal surgery, I don't know," Henson said, noting that Caesarean sections were performed centuries before McDowell's 1809 operation.

"This is the first recorded instance, but people have had cysts a long time before that. How do we know there weren't other abdominal surgeries before that that just didn't get recorded?"

Henson said her play also tries to be honest about the medical profession of that day. For instance, doctors were sometimes regarded as grave robbers because they studied corpses.

But the point is that McDowell is a celebrated figure in Danville, and Pioneer Playhouse is a historic theater.

"Time is so fluid," Henson said. "This connects me to Dad, and it connects me to Jane Todd Crawford."

And it connects her and her theater to Danville history, again.