The film follows Mark Fenwick, a recluse wood sculptor who lives in the forests of Vermont. As a child, Mark (otherwise known as just Fenwick) escaped to the woods to avoid bullies, biker gangs, and the general monotony of 1950’s America; there he used a small hatchet to carve out new worlds and characters of possibility and strangeness.
In the late 1960’s, Fenwick lived as a runaway adolescent, and draft dodger, in the urban centers of the Atlantic coast, while still exploring his artistic talents in the blossoming counter culture enclaves. And just as he had escaped to the forests as a child, Fenwick stumbled upon a group of underground anti-war journalists who had purchased an abandoned farm lot in Vermont, which would become the genesis of the Total Loss Farm commune.
The commune became a haven for a back to land lifestyle fused with pursuits of art, writings, and political commentary. Later on, the group would become very well known for staging backwoods theater adaptations, in which Fenwick assumed the role of set designer, building larger than life creations that enamored thousands in the audience: for Alice in Wonderland, he built an enormous table and chairs, so the actors could run atop; he built a thirty foot high, crystal shaped, amphitheater for Prometheus; and most notably, he built a floating island and Elizabethan style sailboat for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which was the focus of the 1977 documentary “The Stuff of Dreams”.
Over fifty years since Fenwick arrived in Vermont, Fenwick still lives and creates in the house he built on Total Loss Farm. Much of his current work still echoes the ethereal, and theatrical, quality of his days as a set designer. Fenwick remarks, I am sort of doing scenes from a play. You might not have the actors for a play, so you just invent a play. Where there was once thousands of participants of these counter culture performances, Fenwick continues to hew, carve, sculpt, and bend the landscape to the workings of his imagination.
My Years with Prospero tracks a multi-year collaboration and friendship between an artist and a filmmaker, as they venture to the spaces where ships were built, where actors belted lines to the surrounding trees, and where existed an undeniable sense of wonder and possibility.
