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A madeleine and the taste of tea famously evoked the past for French author Marcel Proust in "Remembrance of Things Past."

Can corn pone and buttermilk do the same for the cast of "Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"?Chris Woodworth hopes so.

Woodworth is the new dramaturg and historian in the theater department at UNCG.

The musical, which opens Wednesday at Aycock Auditorium, is her first assignment.It's her job -- one of them anyway -- to help the student actors get a feel for Mark Twain's world and understand what life was like 175 years ago.

She said recently it's a stretch for many, some of whom probably have never seriously considered life before cell phones, iPods, televisions, cars, telephones, McDonald's and supermarkets.

But corn pone and buttermilk?

"I try, if I can, to bring in some sensory elements with my dramaturgical work," she said.

So on Labor Day she baked the corn pone (a type of cornbread) and brought fresh buttermilk so the actors "would get a little taste in their mouths of what people might have eaten in that time."

The rest of her work for the cast, the designers of the show and director John Gulley has involved the library and the Internet more than the kitchen. Books on life in 19th-century America, the Mississippi River, contemporary sketches of the river and life along its banks, biographies of Mark Twain and other subjects line a shelf in her office.

Her research is available to cast and crew in a resource binder "now about three inches thick" and growing, she said.

More information is available on an internal Web site set up for the show's cast and crew. There's information about slavery and abolition. Religious practices. The frontier. American music and minstrelsy. The legacy of Andrew Jackson. Steamboats.And the mighty Mississippi.

The river is the show's title character and just as important as Huck and Jim, the runaway slave who shares Huck's perilous quest for freedom on a raft heading downriver.

Though we might like to think life along the Mississippi was idyllic back then, it wasn't, Woodworth said.

"John [Gulley] has been working ... not to downplay the ugliness of a lot of what was happening in that time, particularly in terms of slavery and abolition, and even down to the (physical) dirtiness."

There's information about the Mississippi's place in communication, commerce ... and pollution, the lack of sanitation and outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.

Questions from cast and crew are also posted on the site.

To create his backstory, the actor playing the con artist known as The King asked about prison life in the 1800s.

"Yesterday, someone in the ensemble said, 'We're trying to generate characters for all these townspeople and we need names'."

Woodworth turned up names popular back then by checking enrollments at colleges between 1820 and 1850. For the unnamed slave characters, she consulted slave narratives and Internet databases.

"It all feeds into trying to help them flesh out the world that they're creating on stage," she said.

Gulley says Woodworth has been "fantastic" in helping "ground the show as much as possible, flesh it out as much as possible and give this show as much dimension as possible."

"Big River" is a big, Tony-winning Broadway show with a rollicking and uplifting score by the late country artist Roger Miller, creator of hits such as "King of the Road" and "Dang Me." But Gulley aims to "demusical-theaterize" the show a bit and underscore the drama. And he's challenged the actors to think about the characters as "people making hard moral decisions."

This is Gulley's second "Big River." In 1991, he directed the musical for the Little Theatre of Winston-Salem.With this production, he said he hopes to "honor the depth and complexity of these characters so we get a real sense of Huck and Jim's journey to freedom."

Jim Shertzer is a freelance contributor. He may be reached at j.shertzer@hotmail.com.