New Maura Campbell Play Is
Based on Dartmouth Murders

Former Randolph resident and playwright Maura Campbell has written a new play, "Dreamtime," based on one of Central Vermont’s darkest moments.

Campbell, who now lives in Burlington, has created a fictionalized version of the double murder of Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop by Chelsea teenagers Robert Tulloch and James Parker in 2001. Both are now serving lengthy prison sentences.

Campbell’s play received its first public exposure last Sunday at Champlain College, with a staged reading featuring four experienced Vermont actors. According to Seven Days, the play will debut in a staged version in May in Virginia at the Norfolk Southern Festival of New Works.

According to Elizabeth Crean of Seven Days, Campbell’s play follows the lives of both the victims and perpetrators and explores the relationship of the dream world to reality—for instance, the two boys’ dreams of relocating in Australia.

This is not Campbell’s first foray into recreating history through fictionalized drama. She has written two plays about the 1832 murder conviction of Rebecca Peake of East Randolph for the killing of her stepson Efrain. One of those plays, "Self Evidence," won the Vermont Playwriting Award for 2005 and was produced again last year in Burlington.

Her first produced play, a comedy starring Kay McLoughlin and Janine Luttrell, was performed above the Chandler Gallery in Randolph in the mid 1980s.