New play 'Ella the Ungovernable' in Valatie

As David McDonald heard the story over the on-and-off decade he's lived in Hudson, a teenage Ella Fitzgerald served time in the early 1930s at a state reform school for girls in the Columbia County city along the Hudson River. After she escaped, Fitzgerald won a talent show at the famed Apollo Theatre in Harlem, launching a jazz-singing career that would last for most of the rest of the 20th century.

But details were scarce for McDonald, a journalist, videographer and filmmaker who about 15 years ago directed "Woodstock Revisited," a documentary that traced the roots of the counterculture movement that led to the 1969 music and art festival.

He found a New York Times story about that period of Fitzgerald's life, and he unearthed additional information from the Prison Public Memory Project, launched in 2011 in Hudson, which has had prisons in and around it since at the least the 1880s. But Fitzgerald herself always refused to address her experiences at the New York Training School for Girls, open from 1904 and 1975 and the destination for girls ages 12 to 16 from across the state convicted of delinquency crimes. Subsequent investigations revealed patterns of physical and sexual abuse by school staff and racial segregation into dilapidated housing of the black girls.

Frustrated at lack of verifiable specifics on which he could base a factual account, McDonald turned to fiction. Initially conceived as a film, which proved too expensive, then a play for an off-off-Broadway theater in Greenwich Village, which didn't work for reasons of cost and logistics, McDonald's story became "Ella the Ungovernable."

The play will have its world premiere this weekend at Valatie Community Theatre, a venue found thanks to a serendipitously timed lunch. McDonald, after trying to cast the play last summer in Hudson, was at the Valatie...