For many years, I attended town meetings around the county to ask for money on behalf of the social service agency I worked for, a request not always popular with towns.

So a few years back in one of our small Franklin County towns while I was waiting for my turn, I took notice when a man stood up to speak on the requests from SAVES (Sexual Assault Victims Emergency Services) and AWAP (Abused Women’s Advocacy Project). He seemed nervous. Perhaps he wasn’t used to addressing a crowd, I thought.

“You have to vote for this,” he told the town.

And then he told them a story. He had been sitting in his truck one night, not far from the building we were meeting in. He heard voices in the dark. And then he heard screams. He realized with a shock that he was being witness to a sexual assault. By then, the man who was telling the story was trembling, and I realized it wasn’t his fear of public speaking. The experience had affected him deeply.

“You think it doesn’t happen here,” he told the town. “Well it does. We really need these services.”

Local playwright Jayne Decker’s play, “Cracked Shells,” which is being performed at 7:30 p.m. May 4 and 5 at the Alumni Theatre at UMF, is about survivors of domestic and sexual violence in our communities. It is drawn from the real stories told to an interviewer from the Healthy Community Coalition from 2004 to 2006 titled, “An Audit of the Community Effectiveness in Responding to Domestic Violence.”

No tickets are being sold – instead, leave a donation for the community group that addresses domestic violence, “Peace In Our Families.”

The play is the result of a grant that has funded not only its production, but the creation of a DVD that will be distributed throughout the state to schools, community groups and libraries.

The drama focuses on four women, each with different stories. There’s the teenager whose life is derailed when she confuses her boyfriend’s possessive and controlling behavior with “love,” the isolated middle-aged rural housewife who is so used to making up stories about her injuries from beatings that she seems to almost believe them, the socialite who covers up the violence in her life with a brittle faade, and the smart-mouthed young mother who no longer knows what to tell her children about why they are hungry and living in their car.

The play is gripping, and the actors are strong and convincing. It became evident during a discussion at the end of the play that the actors’ strength came from their commitment to bringing these topics out in the light, to saying – like the man at the town meeting – “You think it doesn’t happen here. Well it does.”

“I’ve had a lot of friends and family members who were in abusive relationships,” one of the actors said in the discussion afterward. “But the relationships didn’t start out that way. Often, I started out by liking the guy.”

In the audit report, 20 local women were interviewed. Many said they wished they had known more about the warning signs of abuse. Often they thought that their abusers were jealous, limiting their contact with friends and family, telling them what to wear and controlling their everyday choices out of “love.” Their abusers would lose control and get angry and violent, and they thought it was their fault. Their abusers would belittle them so frequently that they began to believe it, and when the violent episodes were over, the abuser would often say he was sorry and it wouldn’t happen again – except it would. All of that is in the play.

A woman in the audience was reminded of aunts who were abused when she was growing up, women who never left those relationships.

“They had to stay because there was nothing else,” she said. “Now it’s talked about, and it’s wonderful to see that change.”

Another audience member, a survivor herself, noted that the play had not addressed the issue of what can happen when a woman decides to leave. Often that is the time when a woman and her children are in the most danger. Counselors advise having a plan and getting support and above all, not telling the abuser that you are leaving or where you are going.

Providing support is what SAVES and AWAP are about. Both have crisis hot lines and local office numbers:

SAVES Rape Crisis Hot Line 1-800-871-7741

SAVES local office 778-9522

Abused Women’s Advocacy Project 24-hour help line 1-800-559-2927

AWAP local office 778-6107

Jayne Decker chose the title for her play to be “Cracked Shells,” and at one point, a long-abused middle-aged woman who finds the courage to leave says that so many times through the years she has gathered her strengths and hopes for leaving like eggs in a basket, only to find them cracked and broken at her feet.

In the play, she finds help and support and does finally leave. And in real life, the women interviewed in the project also found their way to local counselors for help.

It all depends on having hope and believing that things can be better. Perhaps there are two kinds of cracked shells: the dashed hopes of Humpty Dumpty, never to be put together again, and the shell that cracks open from the inside, because a new life is breaking free.