By: centraljersey.com
The actor has performed his one-man adaptation of Washington Irving’s story hundreds of times, narrating, playing five characters, and recreating Ichabod Crane’s famous and frightful ride one autumn night. But there are no effects or stage trickery involved.
"The shows stay relatively simple because I love the fact that it really encourages people to use their imaginations," Mr. Hartley says. "So even when I’m in a theater, it still stays fairly simple."
Mr. Hartley will perform Ichabod Crane, Washington Irving, and the Legend of Sleepy Hallow, Oct. 24 at the Contemporary Clubhouse/Museum in Trenton.
Washington’s story, first published in 1820, involves Ichabod Crane, a strict schoolmaster who is educated, loves to hear ghost stories, and believes them. Ichabod’s imagination gets the best of him – beetles are witches tokens, and snow-covered shrubs are ghosts. After a night sharing and listening to spooky tales at the home of the comely Katrina Van Tassel, Ichabod encounters the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian solider who lost his head during battle in the Revolutionary War.
The simplicity of Mr. Hartley’s staging doesn’t affect the story’s scariness. Of two recent performances at Historic Village at Allaire in Farmingdale, he says, "I had the audience jump and a couple of times scream out, it’s kind of fun."
Mr. Hartley plays five characters in the piece, but he says Ichabod is the primary character.
"And this show is interactive," he says. "Ichabod teaches a lesson plan from the time period. And the way I have it set up is that audience members, if they would like to, can be involved. Because I never want anyone to feel pressure to have to be involved."
Beyond being an ideal piece of entertainment during the Halloween season, Mr. Hartley’s performance also serves as an introduction to a landmark American story for children, not just to hear it but to experience it.
""I often say to audiences that we live in an era of screens, and I love trying to promote the use of people’s imaginations," he says. "It’s lovely when I have them feel like they can see and feel everything Ichabod is seeing feeling.
"People really enjoy it, and with younger audiences I have one or two of them come up on stage with me, as part of the class. Then, because he’s a singing master, I actually teach the audience an adaptation of a song, and they all sing back with me. So it becomes interactive, and I find audiences really enjoy that."
The 40-minute adaptation – which is followed by a talk and a question-and-answer session – features much of Irving’s language.
"The story is fabulous, so I use the text from the time period," he says. "Not only do I not dumb it down for an audience, I’ve found audiences really love that, they respond really well to, and seem to follow it very well, even though it’s Irving’s language."
Mr. Hartley performs several one-man shows at libraries, schools, museums and other venues throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Autumn is the peak season for Sleepy Hollow, he’s doing it 17 times this month, and had to turn down some offers because he’s directing a production of The Pirates of Penzance that will run at LaSalle University in November.
Sleepy Hollow is the first one-man show Mr. Hartley wrote. Years ago, he played Abraham Lincoln for the American Historical Theatre in Philadelphia. Afterward, he asked someone with the group if she knew of any historical characters he could base a show on.
"I wasn’t sure what I was even going for," he says. "And she turned to me and said, ‘No, Neill, you’re too tall.’ I’m 6-foot-4 and apparently no historical people were my height.
"And then she said, ‘Actually there is a fictional character you might be good at, and that’s Ichabod Crane.’ I picked up a collection of the short stories and I did nothing, I forgot all about it. A year later, she called me and said, Remember we were talking about Ichabod Crane and ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ we have a client looking for something unusual for Halloween. And I said, ‘Say no more I’ll come up with something.’"
That led to a Sherlock Holmes show, and historical presentations about Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh. A recent addition is a program about the founder of Lionel Trains, commissioned by Lionel and the American Train Collectors Society.
One reason he came up with other shows was that he thought the demand for his Sleepy Hollow would eventually slow down. That hasn’t happened yet.

