The shouts in St. Paul’s Memorial Church sound like a cross between ecstatic salvation and eternal damnation, but the man commanding the noise—Jason Kobielus, a lean, dark-haired third-year drama major at the University of Virginia—is almost completely quiet. At the altar stands Alex Campbell, whose mohawk drapes low near one of his eyes, and Jake Pasko, whose long brown mane runs to the woman’s fur coat that covers his shoulders, rendering him beastly. In Pasko’s right hand is a knife; in his left, the kicking, struggling weight of first-year Emily Swan.
 Going to the chapel, and he’s gonna get scary: UVA drama student Jason Kobielus turns playwright with God is on the Radio, which opened last weekend at the UVA Chapel. |
“Kill her!” snarls Campbell to Pasko, and although yours truly, hereafter known as Curtain Calls (in the seventh pew from the altar) knows that the prop knife will retract into its handle if it so much as dimples Swan’s flesh, the girl’s captors loom over her like ghouls and the church echoes with her screams and it all seems very, very real.
A few minutes later and the situation is miraculously diffused through what Curt attributes to “directorial intervention”: Kobielus halts his actors and crew, a dozen or so UVA students he recruited for God is on the Radio, his first play, and sends them home with a reminder about the next night’s rehearsal. The actors leave and a violinist enters the cavernous church to rehearse. The noise interferes with CC’s tape recorder, so Kobielus leads Curt to the basement to talk a bit about his play.
Kobielus wrote God is on the Radio during his winter break from UVA, only a month or so after his menacing turn as Malvolio in Twelfth Night at Culbreth Theatre, from first script to first show, the entire production took less than three months. The story is structured much like the films Pulp Fiction or Crash—a convergence of coincidences in which people of fractured faiths mend breaks in their lives. The challenge with student-run productions, of course, is competing with equally fractured schedules. “Finding little crevices of time,” as Kobielus puts it, for rehearsals and performances.
Rather than hold auditions, he pulled actors and technicians he knew—friends, and colleagues from previous productions, “actors whose work I enjoyed, actors who I can trust.” Matthew Marcus, who plays a young Buddhist, performed alongside Kobielus in the UVA drama department’s productions of Twelfth Night and Ubu Roi; third-year student Katie Willis also performed in Roi. (In fact, Willis joins Marcus onstage in Live Arts’ Lysistrata, which ends its run this week.) Pasko and Harrison Gibbons, both third-years, met Kobielus in UVA’s First-Year Players production of Fiddler on the Roof.
God is on the Radio had a very limited engagement (February 22-24 at the UVA Chapel; if you caught the show, e-mail curtain@c-ville.com), but Kobielus already has his next project in the works—a one-man show about a summer spent as a lifeguard. Certain that this is a performer to keep track of, CC asks Kobielus if there is a chance that God is on the Radio will be performed again. The young director smiles with that same manic energy as the violin hums distantly upstairs.
“I may revise a few things,” he says. “There might be a future for this play.”
The Cirque is in town
A week before Cirque du Soleil’s opening night performance of Saltimbanco! at the John Paul Jones Arena, CC stood next to local public relations wiz John Kelly and Saltimbanco! bus manager Margey Shaw in the Alakazam toy store on the Downtown Mall as four members of Shaw’s cast ran amok. Three men on stilts played with spring-loaded toys and noisemakers while another grabbed objects to juggle, all weaving wobbly paths around the store to catch kids from the growing crowd by surprise.
| Video of Cirque du Soleil performers at the Alakazam toy store. |
“You should see them when we go grocery shopping,” Shaw says with a laugh. “I tell them, ‘You don’t need to go out in costume.’”
Although the touring company of Cirque du Soleil performs just the type of sensational spectacles perfectly crafted for kids in a toy store, the bright minds behind the week of surprise appearances and flashmob-esque street performances were planned by two UVA graduates, Michelin Hall and Timothy Wooster. Who, if you ask Curt, have the greatest job description he’s come across.
“We pride ourselves on creating magical services and environments,” says Wooster in a phone interview from the pair’s Hell’s Kitchen office in New York, where they run Theatre Mama Show Distribution Network, a contracted advertising company. Wooster and Hall met briefly as first-year students at UVA in 1994, when they lived in adjacent dorm buildings, then more memorably at a Christmas party in 1997, months before they graduated; the two have been nearly inseparable since their graduation in 1998 (Hall with a theater and education major, Wooster with an English degree), and started Theatre Mama roughly four years ago.
For a show like Saltimbanco!, Theatre Mama reinvigorates standard marketing with a bit of meticulously planned spontaneity. With the help of Hall and Wooster, Cirque recently flooded the streets of San Diego, California, and Denver, Colorado, with angels for an upcoming tour called Corteo; the pair also loosed a crew of a half-dozen or so kite-flying acrobats upon San Francisco for a new cirque show called Kooza (for photos, head to theatremama.com/cirque/kiteaction).
The group’s confrontation theater-styled advertising poses an even greater impact in a smaller city like Charlottesville, where a crew of stilt-walking mime-clown hybrids are a tad more likely to attract some looks on a small spot like the Downtown Mall. “You don’t know whether you’ll be met by 600 people or six people,” says Hall. “But using yourself as a performer, changing in those situations, is really rewarding.”
Bacon bits
In CC’s endless quest to prove some familiar connection to Daniel Day-Lewis, he exercised the ol’ “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” test, hoping to tie himself to the star of There Will Be Blood. (Full disclosure: This column was written before the Oscars and if Day-Lewis doesn’t nab the trophy for Best Actor, Curt is bailing on him to pursue ties to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who kicked ass in The Savages.)
Funny thing is, Curt turned up far more interesting news; namely, that the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” test was actually developed as a computer program by a former UVA Computer Science instructor named Brett Tjaden, who created the original Oracle of Bacon in 1996. Incidentally, Daniel Day-Lewis has a “Bacon number” of two. Will someone cast Curt in a film so he can figure his number out?
Got any arts news? Have a personal connection to Daniel Day-Lewis? E-mail curtain@c-ville.com.