PORT ANGELES — In celebration of its first quarter-century, the North Olympic Land Trust is harkening back to an old-time advocate for forests and fish.
Benjamin Franklin will be in the house — in the body of actor-historian Christopher Lowell — in a single performance at the Little Theater at Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd., at 7 p.m. Friday.
Tickets are $20 in advance at www.northolympiclandtrust.org, with proceeds to benefit the land trust’s conservation work.
Remaining tickets will be sold at the theater door; in the meantime, the land trust can be reached at 360-417-1815. The organization, which marks its 25th anniversary this year, has conserved more than 3,000 acres of forest- and farmland across Clallam County, through easements and other collaborative work with landowners.
Lowell, who lives in Colorado Springs, taught theater at the University of Colorado for many years before going full time with his one-man show, “Ben Franklin Live,” in 2006.
Since then, he’s been Ben all over this country and in France, where Franklin spent time.
Lowell, 73, is fluent in French and performs the show in that tongue when he’s invited to do so.
His foray to Port Angeles comes thanks to his long-ago classmate Jim Aldrich, a North Olympic Land Trust board member. Some decades back, the two men attended Williston Academy, a prep school in Massachusetts. Both went on to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., where Lowell studied theater and Aldrich geology.
Lowell’s portrayal of Franklin is an outstanding one, Aldrich said, in the way it brings to life the founding father’s well- and lesser-known endeavors.
Early environmentalist
Franklin, who lived from 1706 to 1790, was an early environmentalist, “an amazing person of the Enlightenment,” Aldrich added.
Lowell gave some specifics: Franklin believed in planting trees and in responsible forest management. And in Philadelphia during the 1740s, he led a coalition to prevent canneries from dumping their garbage into the tributaries of the Delaware River.
“He always was very active in sanitation; he installed the first second-story toilet,” Lowell noted.
And like many on the North Olympic Peninsula, he can relate to another Franklin project: the paper mill he ran in Philadelphia.
Lowell himself worked in a plywood mill in Eureka, Calif., as a young man.
Following the hourlong show, Lowell — still as Ben — responds to audience questions.
Often, those are about current affairs, such as whom Franklin would vote for in the 2016 race for president of the United States.
To that one, he says it would not only be inappropriate but also arrogant to comment on matters of the 21st century.
Franklin is a man from another time — who offers wit, wisdom and values but not punditry.
The actor has another message for his listeners.
“One of the reasons I picked Ben Franklin,” Lowell said, “is that he was highly contributive to his world — later in life.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
