Curt’s attempt to blend into the black box of the Hamner Theater for the 2007 Playwrights Conference was thwarted roughly 20 minutes into a reading of co-artistic director Peter Coy‘s A Shadow of Honor, a new play commissioned by Wintergreen Performing Arts for its 2007 Summer Music Festival to correspond with the 400th anniversary of Jamestown and the 200th of Albemarle’s neckin’ neighbor, Nelson County. Shadow director (and Coy’s co-artistic director) Boomie Pedersen, last spotted on the Live Arts stage in a jarring production of Old Times, called our bluff (which, for the record, was "Yes, I can read") and tossed this mellow dramatic into the reading.
 How the participants at the Hamner Theater’s annual Playwrights Conference spent their summer vacation: 12 hours spent refining clever new plays, 12 hours (not pictured) spent in existential anguish over their art. |
After the stage fright subsided, CC spoke with Coy about his play, a convergence of a 1907 murder in Nelson County by a former district judge and a loosely linked 2007 marital struggle. "We sold out every show at Wintergreen, which wasn’t rough," said Coy. "We had a 34-person theater." Due to the structure of the Wintergreen fest, Coy showed the 1907 plot without its intricate 2007 tie-ins.
In exchange for jumping through the hoops, CC came away with a few tidbits regarding the Hamner’s next season, which will include A Shadow of Honor (April 9-20) as well as a piece finessed during the 2006 conference, Clinton Johnston‘s Am I Black Enough Yet? (March 12-23). Next on the Hamner’s horizon: a group of one-acts by Coy, Johnston and Joel Jones, another 2006 alumnus whose latest, Miraculus, is being workshopped this year. The one-acts start on September 20.
C-VILLE’s resident nose for prose followed the scent of art to UVA where, even in the drudge of summer, it located a few stirrings of brilliance. The annual Young Writers Workshop drew to a close this week, but not without yours truly sneaking into a performance by some of the sharp young students who opted to spend a few weeks living at a UVA dorm for the sake of creating stellar poetry, plays, songwriting and fiction.
UVA is quite the storm of creative writing this summer, it seems. Benjamin Cohen, an assistant professor of science, technology and society, found his way onto the online lit journal, McSweeney’s, with a creative piece entitled "Muscle and Flow."
And, in the pages of a little sumpin’ sumpin’ called The Atlantic, UVA’s Creative Writing Program ranked as one of the nation’s top 10 graduate writing programs. And, while "MFA" typically refers to a Master of Fine Arts, we’re reasonably sure that, in UVA’s case, the acronym stands for…well…the last word is "awesome."
Ever the culture vulture, Curt headed to the Paramount on Tuesday, July 24, for the announcement of the upcoming season (which spans from The Fifth Dimension‘s September 9 gig to the Five Browns‘ piano quintet performance on February 21). Standing beside dapper new president, Edward Rucker (overheard speaking with a Paramount volunteer about taking "one of the original tours" in 1990 during the theater’s remodeling), Sir Callington offered a quick plea to the Muse of Quality Live Performances (by the way, you’re welcome).
In return, we got a salad bar of performers—a little bit of freshness overwhelmed by some old greens—that caters to the early bird dinner crowd: Turtle Island and Leo Kottke, Ricky Skaggs and the Aquila Theatre Company have stopped through town previously, and will divide Paramount dates with country vamp Wynonna, Dionne Warwick (a female answer to Rod Stewart’s crooning) and a touring production of The Barber of Seville. For the love of modernism, let’s freshen the mix up! You listening, Muse?
Got any art news to share? E-mail us at curtain@c-ville.com.