Josh Dorman says his complex dreamscapes are a “response and homage” to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, a 1998 record by Neutral Milk Hotel. Photo: Eze Amos
Questions of intent and meaning loom palpably over a pair of exhibitions at Second Street Gallery: Josh Dorman’s “how strange it is to be anything at all” and “Dirty Mirror” by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack. Both shows invite extended scrutiny because the artists take unconventional approaches to their chosen forms of expression. Expect to have long looks, but be aware that conclusions may vary: Prepare to be confounded or frustrated or fascinated or delighted—or all of the above.
On the walls of Second Street’s main space, Dorman helpfully admits the open-ended intent of his art, yet he lays his muse bare from the get-go anyway: the 1998 record In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. He says that his complex explosive dreamscapes are a “response and homage” to the album and “derive a poetic inspiration” from its “language and internal logic.” Dorman himself—and indeed, a consensus across the internet—believes that the words of the band’s visionary Jeff Magnum are beyond any rational explanation. Where does that leave us?
If that squirrelly meaning best defines the indie rock influence for his work, it’s admittedly difficult to draw direct parallels to the Neutral Milk Hotel songs beyond the borrowed titles and lyrical phrases. At least for me it is, since my familiarity with the group pretty much begins and ends in knowing it’s the favorite band of April Ludgate from “Parks and Recreation.
No matter, though, because there’s a great deal to digest and decipher. In a way, Dorman’s shiny resin-coated ink, acrylic, and antique paper on wood panels are reminiscent of the nightmare fauna in Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Faceless human busts lurk, headless animals and beasts hewn of later industrial age debris plunge ass-over-head into waterfalls, helplessly ride conveyor belts, and foolishly climb precarious cliffs. They navigate worlds with opaque perspectives: a pastiche of landscapes folding upon themselves with blueprint guidelines tussling for space against mountain crags while classical columns hover over railway bridges.
Tapestries and cushions, by fiber artists Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack, are currently on display in Second Street’s Dové Gallery. Photo: Eze Amos
Dorman’s most uniquely effective device is his use of depth. What might function as a decorative gimmick in a lesser artist’s hands provides one of the strongest arguments to visit Second Street to see these works in person, as two-dimensional photos fail to capture them. Some employ an inward layering of resin to form swirling wave pools, active insect nests, or in “Villa of the Mysteries” (2018), a flesh-eating cauldron rife with capillary-like root growth. His mix of painting with collage reflects a mind at play—in “Excavating Babel” (2020), Dorman recasts the scissored relics of aged book illustrations into a city of no particular century, pointing its mismatched spires into the nebulous belly of an improbable sky. Psychedelic, sure. But there’s more than simple trippiness here. The problem—or the solution, maybe—is that any kind of narrative will likely only reveal itself to the individual. Like hundreds of Rorschach tests exposed at once, each piece defies you to focus.
More uneven cityscapes await in Second Street’s intimate Dové Gallery, where Doyle and McCormack trade tapestries and cushions. That’s not a putdown, because for all the textile in the space, the products of their handiwork are not what anyone would sanely call comforting.
Textile art rarely trades in urban grit as thoroughly as Doyle does here, with figures striding atop strata of subterranean profundity that is home to a bestiary of surprising beings engulfed in murky topographies. Angry sexuality pops out in the nude flipping us the bird in “Six Feet High” (2018). Others construct hazier moods and dare us to trust our eyes. An outsized female treads upon a sewer grate that leads into a striped-horizon fantasy world, while in “The Witness” (2017), a face lords over high rises and under a graffiti tag-style rendering of the word “SEEN,” while further below, a rift unearths deep space and a passing satellite. “Ebbflow” (2015) features a shadow crossing a starry field, but beneath it, another time and/or another location is let loose.
The deliberately irregular shapes of the tapestries themselves are creations as personal as the artist’s relationship with urban life. And a second connection to Dorman emerges in the difficulty of determining our point of view: Here, too, staking out temporal and geographic assurance is a bitch.
McCormack, Doyle’s show partner, brings an ironic hand to crocheted bird skeletons (“Thicket I & II,” 2020, “Swim Team,” 2021) and lusty westerners (“Libidinous Drifter,” 2021), as well as smirkingly provocative textual pieces like “You Know He Told Everyone” (2021), a banner proclaiming “Edging” (“Modesty Blanket,” 2021), and a pillow topped by a handgun appliqué (“Sweet Dreams,” 2021). McCormack’s works encourage speculation like good gossip; the phrases concoct a humorous, sinister theme that carries the immediate intrigue of overhearing a single line of a passerby fighting with someone on the phone. And as far as stitched pillow messages go, ”Live, Laugh, Love” this ain’t.
“how strange it is to be anything at all” Josh Dorman & “Dirty Mirror” Dance Doyle and Caitlin McCormack
You can find The Bonnet Maker’s works at Second Street Gallery’s “Teeny Tiny Trifecta 3” show; the gallery’s online “BondBound 2020” exhibition; online in the Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives’ “Inside” exhibition; and at bonnetmaker.com. Image courtesy of the artist
Ida Mitchell Puffenbarger wasn’t an artist. If she had any inclination, she likely didn’t have the time. With the bulk of her days spent cleaning, cooking, caring for her family, and attending church, she also didn’t mix with people outside her religious community of Old German Baptist Brethren. She dressed plainly and, like the other female believers in Franklin, West Virginia, wore a bonnet as a symbol of the Biblical concept of headship, which states that women’s purpose is to be subordinate to men as part of God’s order of creation. She died in 1972.
Her life, faith, and the bonnet she wore every day came to serve as artistic inspiration to someone in her family who she never knew. Rochelle Sumner, Ida’s great-granddaughter, discovered the old order dress and prayer coverings in a trunk—remnants of a different time, colored by a tenacious self-seclusion and heavy with the presence of a rigid belief system.
“I began thinking about the women in my family, and how we’ve covered ourselves for generations,” says Sumner. Reflecting on the fact that Ida was the last woman of her family to wear a bonnet and dress plainly, she believes the metaphorical version—emotional distance and hiding from outsiders as a form of protection—still runs deeply through the psyche of her relatives. That bonnet and what it came to represent took on something greater in scope, and thus The Bonnet Maker was born.
It’s hard to pin down the project by the specifications that classify most fine art, but it connects performance, brief narrative writing, and photography. The latter portions are visually directed by Will Kerner, photographer and a co-founder of Charlottesville’s Live Arts and Light House Studio, whom Sumner met in October of 2017. Sumner says that the collaboration works because of Kerner’s empathy for the character—and for her when she embodies it.
Donning a costume based upon her great-grandmother’s dresses and bonnets from the 1940s and 1950s, modified with an elongated cape and apron, Sumner and Kerner create engaging results captured in photos and buttressed by lines of text.
The Bonnet Maker traverses empty natural settings and passes through mundane structures given new, ominous contexts; parking lots surrender in post-apocalyptic black and white sunshine, mirrored structures magnify a greater rift between past and present. Changes brought on by the pandemic have intensified the isolation of the character and infused the visuals. Much can be said of gender issues, systems of oppression, and contemporary isolation, both self-imposed and those brought about by society.
In nearly every context, The Bonnet Maker character appears pained, struggling with an inner conflict simmering right at the surface. As reining in that conflict creates tension, the project’s interpretation of a belief system produces another kind of fragile balance.
Both artists maintain the importance of respecting the OGBB community as they explore its ideals artistically. Kerner, like Sumner, is also of a German protestant denomination (the relatively less-strict Moravians), and says the idea of “an older religious sect being placed into the context of today’s world” is part of what appealed to him about becoming involved in the project.
The pair started creating at the end of 2017 when Sumner, in her OGBB costume, and Kerner visited a live nativity scene at Church of the Brethren in Rockingham County, which was also the first time she wore the outfit in public.
“I was very nervous because I didn’t know how people would react to seeing an old order woman at their church,” she recalls.
Other times, they’ve taken to shooting in even more unscripted situations. On Instagram (@thebonnetmaker), the hooded figure confronts nacho food trucks, beauty queens, and police officers. The results are more akin to a documentary capturing the cultural and temporal dissonance, with Sumner’s character drawing smiles and stares from the general public with occasionally comic results.
Kerner says that public shoots, like one at the Rockingham County Fair, can feel edgy because his presence as photographer gives her appearance the buzz of a theatrical event. For Sumner’s part, she tends to stay in character during interactions, but says she’ll drop it if they mention old order heritage in their family.
Interactions aren’t always so breezy. For a performance at Ghost in Reverse at Woolen Mills, Sumner set up a Bonnet Maker Shop, where anyone could try on bonnets and leave written comments about the experience.
“There were angry responses and an aversion by most women who read the large handwritten scroll hanging on the wall,” Sumner says. It recounted St. Paul’s 1,900-year-old instruction about head covering and the headship concept infuriated many women visitors.
“One woman thought I was trying to convert women to the old order, and did not realize it was a performance. It’s good to know I can be that convincing!” Sumner says.
She and Kerner plan to do more performances locally, and to continue creating chapters to the character.
Animal-lovers had a lot to look forward to with the Virginia Festival of the Book’s March 2020 lineup—before it was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
If you’re doing what you’re supposed to do (please say yes), you’re just staying home. For many of us, that means fattening comfort food and boozy evenings binge watching “Tiger King.” Though it’s unquestionably difficult to watch Joe Exotic’s mistreatment of the majestic creatures he’s bred and trapped into an unnatural life, the great cats are a draw for viewers.
Animals fascinate us. Yet those in zoos live their whole lives in a kind of quarantine lockdown and now we’re almost right there with them. Unlike our beastly relatives, we’ve still got options, however small those might seem. In addition to what’s streaming into our homes, we’ve got two other powerful means of escapism: reading books and going for walks outside.
A bevy (rook? business? school?) of animal-themed titles slated to be part of the wisely canceled Virginia Festival of the Book is still available to provide us with a detour from our own thoughts and the onslaught of grim headlines. Through pages ranging from the scientific and ecological to the fictional and symbolic, the authors implore us to recognize how animals of all stripes are constantly striving to overcome difficulties compounded by our recklessness.
Conservationist and Audubon magazine field editor Kenn Kaufman offers Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration. Though we’re all rightfully anxious about how coronavirus may continue to disrupt our lives—let alone all of those lost travel plans—Kaufman’s latest explains how climate change and human development have seriously upended birds’ schedules and flight paths. His timely seasonal tome recounts some of the utterly incredible accomplishments of migrating birds, including those converging along Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio.
Take for example the blackpoll warbler. The migratory songbird about the size of a human thumb isn’t much to look at and weighs, appropriate to this article, about as much as a ballpoint pen. Yet this generally nondescript little chirper is known to fly more than 6,000 miles from the Amazon to the Arctic by way of Florida and Ohio. Then, just to spice things up, he takes an alternate route back south. After a rest stop in Massachusetts, it’s a monumental 80-hour flight for four nights and three days—2,000 miles straight to South America. And you’re complaining about getting your steps in this week.
Looking to submerge instead? Author and retired Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries manager Paul Bugas lends his expertise to the Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Virginia. The reference details the denizens of our nearby waterways, drawing on Bugas’ decades of hands-on experience (he’s also a biologist); he and his fellow contributing authors and artists illuminate the commonwealth’s many natural-born swimmers. Tips explain how to collect, handle, and protect central Virginia’s diverse fish populations, but it’s not just for anglers: You’ll learn where you can best observe these fish locally, which, to be fair, will be much easier after the stay-at-home order is lifted.
If you’re more apt to dive into fiction, three novelists offer up thematic forays into the philosophical and political use of beasts.
Washington, D.C.-based Rick Hodges mixes political intrigue with a nature tale in To Follow Elephants, an eco-minded adventure thriller inspired by his travels in Africa. The story of an 18-year-old American seeking out his missing army captain father wraps its narrative around the education of a young elephant by his herd’s matriarch; the resulting style informs Hodges’ novel with a wisdom that transcends the petty squabbles of man, and elevates the pachyderms as characters in their own right.
Speaking of young ones, Johanna Stoberock has created an allegorical work about four children on an island that receives the entire planet’s trash, which the kids sort and feed to a herd of hungry pigs. Lord of the Flies comparisons are inevitable, but Pigs provides another take as the adults occupy a much different function for the endangered youths, acting as cruel overlords; the elders party like the power hungry porkers of Animal Farm while the children toil. The plot thickens when a boy suddenly washes ashore.
Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth tells a less fantastic tale, but one that’s no less loony. It’s a half-love/half-heist story about two egg industry auditors and their plot to steal a farm’s million chickens under cover of darkness. The bizarre, funny, and politically charged tale about love’s ability to fuel odd decisions makes grand and cavalier jumps into the minds of chickens—and maybe more unexpectedly— zips thousands of years forward into a bleak future where the animals navigate a planet destroyed by humans.
Of course, that dire possibility is what people like Kaufman and Bugas have spent their lives warning everyone about, while doing what they could to prevent that kind of catastrophe. And as we’ve got a very real disaster of our very own to contend with, it’s just better to keep the door closed for now, and hunker down with a good book.
Through pages ranging from the scientific and ecological to the fictional and symbolic, the authors implore us to recognize how animals of all stripes are constantly striving to overcome difficulties compounded by our recklessness.
Laura Wooten's "Alentejo" series (this is "Alentejo 5") is now on view in the "She's in Monochrome" show at Second Street Gallery. Image courtesy Second Street Gallery
What do we really see when hues are subdued, diminished, or deleted outright?
Tough question. If you’re like me—colorblind—that’s kind of how you go through life. Art’s power when deprived of its full spectrum of possibility is difficult to gauge, since most of us who live the difference are simply born this way and have no basis of comparison. Yet in an interesting challenge, Second Street Gallery’s curator Kristen Chiacchia issued an invitation to local artists to create works that remove their usual reliance on color to express themselves. The resulting exhibition, “She’s in Monochrome,” now occupying SSG’s Dové Gallery until October 25, is surprisingly rich and varied, despite the black, white, and gray rules strictly governing the works on display.
Gray Dodson (whose very name along with fellow artists Sam Gray and Pam Black makes it seem as if she were practically born for this type of show) doesn’t stray from her aesthetic inclination to focus skyward, a go-to subject of hers along with landscapes and images of water. Devoid of her usual soft color interplay, “Big Rain” and “Place of Unknowing” are downright monolithic, with protuberances of cloudbursts taking on an Old Testament lashing out on the land in the former, while muddled sunlight struggles behind the wet wisps of the trees in the latter. We’re entering an unreal setting that’s gloomy but not without a dim glimmer of promise at its heart.
Krista Townsend’s views of the land in “Glacier” and “Vermont Woods” offer a more clear-cut sense of form and shadow in nature. By taking what comes across as a nearly two-dimensional approach while working within the confinement of greys, her work reveals a chilliness that is either a believable presentation of a steely-skied day or an icy night.
Providing an altogether different vision of landscapes, Laura Wooten’s five numbered “Alentejo” pieces expose verdant hillsides robbed of their greens and browns, eliciting colder images of south central Portugal. There’s something of Japanese sumi-e brush painting in her India ink and synthetic Yupo paper, as well; the stark pitch of the land loops and rolls, sliced by lightning bolt walking paths that catch the sun in cool forks, splaying the earth with serpentine pathways.
Nature nearly reaches its simulacrum breaking point in the grandmotherly floral patterns that have found a strange home in Lou Haney’s works on fabric and aluminum. The absence of bright pastels or cheerful shades on the petals of “Black Velvet If You Please” and “Quilt Gilt” are unsettling even to the colorblind eye. The Lycra, cotton, and beadwork feels more wrong than perhaps it should, but that very space is where the profound difference between expectation and this monochromatic reality plays most heavily upon both our senses and ability to interpret without the usual crutches or cues.
Considering the constraints of the show, perhaps the most vivid works come from Sam Gray, who presents mythical plant people occupying sharp locales that shimmer with fantastically cartoonish, stylized graphic qualities. “Cosmic Seed” reveals a being emerging from its plant pod and floating to celestial heights via its free-flying roots. In “New Stories,” the fungal woman ignores the jet goop dripping off her mushroom-capped head despite it getting everywhere—but with good reason, as she’s deep in ritual. Smoldering flame alights her blackened left hand while she draws with her right: a beginning, the start of a circle on a page, in black and white.
Geoffrey Kent and Zoe Speas star in American Shakespeare Center’s Antony and Cleopatra. Photo by Lindsey Walters
Though Antony and Cleopatra isn’t always considered a problem play, after seeing it at the American Shakespeare Center I can report that it really should be.
Categorizing it as a problem play might be a lazy definition for a work defying easy literary taxonomies, but it does the trick. In ASC’s case (here comes a 413-year-old spoiler), titular characters YOLO-ing themselves into nasty suicides are preceded by pointed zingers, drunken antics, and stage time for a hilarious, snake-handling bumpkin; but the play’s refusal to fit neatly into one genre is amplified in other ways. Take its sword-and-shield action throwdown or constant political wrangling, and you’d swear you’re watching a historical drama; a romance (in our modern sense of the word) bubbles up voyeuristic heart shapes during scenes of a couple who can’t keep their lusty old-world mitts off of each other.
This loose sequel to Julius Caesar (also being performed this season at ASC along with George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra) follows one of the murdered ruler’s three successors, Mark Antony, and his all-consuming affair with Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. The over-simplified plot: the three-men-led Roman Republic is trying to keep it together despite serious friction, while unsurprisingly, Antony’s nights of ass and alcohol aren’t going over well with his associates or followers.
The takeaways of the play are manifold yet murky, and this performance stresses the difficulty of its essential questions: Can true love exist in the absence of lust? Is it impossible to trust anyone deeply in love? Should we permit the lovesick to hold leadership positions? Are promises between business partners worth less than those made to someone with whom we share our bed?
Shakespeare’s still dead, so I attempted to come to my own conclusions. My lessons learned were pretty pedestrian: Don’t mix business with pleasure and try not to lose your mind when you get into a relationship. Don’t quote me, but I’m reasonably certain that few people besides the anonymous medieval morality playwrights and Bertolt Brecht ever said a night at the theater was supposed to be didactic.
But as a vehicle of entertainment, this version of Antony and Cleopatra is quite good.
Director Sharon Ott’s inventive staging choices constantly recast the sumptuous Blackfriars Playhouse stage. Cleverly lit back curtains part to roll out Cleopatra’s satiny bed, revealing her luxurious inner chamber. Later, a long banner of hieroglyphs descends from the ceiling as the Egyptian ruler and her attendants rise from the floor in the august surroundings of her monument hideout. In Roman scenes, soldiers and guards overlook proceedings from the balcony as their colors blanket Caesar’s power hub. Out on Sextus Pompey’s galley, he and his pirates take to the stage stairs to connote the deck, and a few barrels used as seats do a convincing job of hoisting us aboard the Good Ship Pompey.
Surprisingly, for 42 scenes with locations smeared across Alexandria, Rome, and elsewhere, the settings are easy to imagine, which may not always be the case when watching the typically bare stages of Blackfriars.
Credit is due to designer Murell Horton. Steely Roman marital garb provides austere authority, while flowing Egyptian outfits appear in fresh white before being replaced with darkened threads by play’s end; both major warring parties are buoyed and expertly informed by dress without ever crossing the line into exaggerated parody or Halloween costumery.
Maybe it was the Vienna Lager tallboys I bought from the on-stage bartender, but I’m quite sure that the company’s choice of strategically timed music aided in the believability of the play’s constant shifting of place. Ominous drones menace, thudding drums sketch conflict impressions, horns announce, and percussive, opaque melodies slink beckoningly.
Now about the acting. Certain members of the cast can do no wrong. They’re incredibly versatile professionals who are as at home parading as kings as holding their crotches in agony when playing fools. David Anthony Lewis (Agrippa, Philo), Sylvie Davidson (Iras, Octavia), Constance Swain (Charmian), John Harrell (Maecenas, Messenger), David Watson (Lepidus, Schoolmaster), and Ronald Román-Meléndez (Soothsayer, Pompey, and Ventidius) excel in their craft. Their very presence is engaging as they imprint their style upon the play’s poetry without ever getting tripped up by trying too hard—unlike some cloying, tiring cast members who I won’t name outright.
Happily, Zoe Speas (Cleopatra) and Geoffrey Kent (Antony) exhibit a chemistry that drives the pair’s performances to a much higher level than they seemed capable of alone—but which, to be fair, might be too much to sustain throughout their alternating bouts of self-pitying guilt and jealous rage. They’re best eye-locked in fiery desire. But as we all know, these moments—especially with the ancient world at stake—can’t last. Burning passion only creates problems, particularly for critics unsure of what to do with a history-based rom-com ending in tragedy.
Morbid fascination fuels the exhibition “Subculture Shock: Death, Punk, & the Occult in Contemporary Art,” at Second Street Gallery in September. Courtesy of the artist
Brooklyn multimedia artist Tamara Santibañez, one of the seven featured in Second Street Gallery’s group show “Subculture Shock: Death, Punk, & the Occult in Contemporary Art,” was recently quoted in The New York Times about Latinx artists’ use of family history and heritage. She explained that though her art represents her interests in aggressive underground music, queer kink, and Mexican-American imagery, she doesn’t speak for everyone who identifies with those groups.
Santibañez makes a key point that’s transferable to the multifarious visions constituting “Subculture Shock.” Some Latinx artists regularly draw from a collective pool of symbols and images with “highly individualized interpretations,” and there’s a similar essence informing the SSG exhibition.
Despite common influences, the Second Street show provides an original take on inclusion, bridging gender, sexual orientation, and a diverse set of experiences. Enlightening by delving into the darkness, the exhibition liberates viewers to relive the subcultural jolt the creators experienced during their youth—likely considered deviant acts of self-discovery. Picture it: Lunch periods fixated on piles of Satanist-themed books in the middle school library, afternoons blocking out the adult world’s cowardly warnings with punk’s existential blasts of harmonic fury, and, enticed by ghostly mentors, staring contests with masterworks of their art world predecessors before eventually forging their own illuminating truths.
These varied distillations of those experiences still need to interact in a meaningful way, and thankfully, they do.
“Group shows are often a hodgepodge of artists just thrown together with no cohesive thought,” says Kristen Chiacchia, SSG’s executive director and chief curator. “I wanted to do a show where the artists are not only looking at the same themes and ideas, but one where the result is visually coherent. I purposefully chose art that looks like it goes together.”
Each artist’s personal iconography recalls aspects borrowed from punk’s multigenerational history, then remixed with other subcultural touchstones. Evie Falci’s pieces pull from punk’s recurrent fashion choice of metal studs and black pleather. The Brooklyn-based artist insists the geometric forms reflect her own symbolic order, and the resulting trio of designs feels like a strange confluence of indigenous beadwork with astrological or alchemical musings affixed delicately to the rough-and-ready outerwear of slam dancers.
Santibañez’s aforementioned influences are evident in sculptures bearing brightly-colored Latinx folk art traditions imposed on BDSM gear—a reflection of her own kink expression, but paraphernalia that has long become part of a traditional punk ensemble. She explores her fetishism further in “landscapes,” monochromatic paintings of leather bunched into magnified topographic shapes that embody desires and reflect the grim catechism of an exacting sexual subset. The three pieces create an interesting dialog with Falci’s works.
Continuing the BDSM and occult theme, Jessicka Addams’ contribution, “Childhood Telepathy,” an acrylic on watercolor paper, features a crying face in a cat-shaped, full-head mask commiserating with a similarly distressed disembodied cat head marked with a forehead pentagram. Perhaps best known as the singer of Jack Off Jill during the 1990s, the Los Angeles artist’s chosen subject and medium is imbued with the innocent freedom of color blossoming in pointillist rainbow tears, a vibrant treatment of an undisclosed trauma.
Out in the open, and unavoidable, is the human skull: a go-to emblem of punk logos and album art, an ominous icon of the occult, and the longstanding reminder of mortality. The skull image is a ghoulish refrain played throughout the show. You’ll find it smirking in the mixed-media on paper works from Brooklyn-based Peter Benedetti’s imaginatively tortured and disfigured demons (“This Is Not A Pipe”). It grins through New Yorker Paul Brainard’s graphite images in no less than three iterations of punk legends The Misfits’ skeletal mascot, the Crimson Ghost. Danish artist Frodo Mikkelsen’s paintings incorporate skulls as well, perhaps best realized in his silver-plated skull sculpture, a magical jewel crowned with tiny, detailed architecture.
Taking the concept to its ultimate conclusion, New Jersey artist Porkchop recasts Egyptian royalty, Catholic Marys, gnomes, and historical busts in the cold unifier of death. Repainting found sculptures in stark, smooth blacks, whites, and gold leaf, elicits an otherworldly ghoulishness. Details like his intimate alphabet of reimagined letters underlines the impenetrable nature of death while trading in cryptic mysticism. Porkchop’s altar of unlikely neighbors represents an unfamiliar hierarchy posed with newly ranked, sinister import.
Are these artists fixated with death or is it the byproduct of reveling in a subculture with a grim view of the world? “Subculture Shock” doesn’t give definite answers, but suggests there’s more empowerment, freedom, and fun to be had down in the underworld than what’s clowning in plain sight.
Pencil art and collaged poetry reveal the tortuous allure of soul searching in “Un-becoming Peter Allen” at McGuffey Art Center through August 18. “Albedo” is one of the works included in Allen’s third solo show since joining McGuffey in 2011. Courtesy of the artist.
A confession: I’m not adequately prepared to discuss Peter Allen’s “Un-becoming” show at McGuffey Art Center with the level of insight both the artist and his art deserve.
I certainly spent plenty of preparatory time and afforded the exhibition my contemplative attention. No, this is just a shortcoming of my own faculties—the same dearth that surely plagues the stupefied majority of Allen’s audiences. For there exists a gap of confounding distance between the viewer and the disarmingly tight collection of striking, illuminating, and unflinching personal visions alighting the walls of the Sarah B. Smith Gallery. For seven pieces, there is much to digest and decode.
I’ll liken my feeling of ineptitude to those moments when, reading an article, you pause to look up some referenced concept with which you’re unfamiliar; then, two minutes later, you find yourself on Wikipedia reading its definition for the fifth time, starting to question if it’s actually written in English, convinced that you know less after this fruitless endeavor than when you started, and cursing yourself for having dicked around so much during formative middle school math and science classes.
This is the overwhelming effect of Allen’s brilliance in visual art and poetry. To my great satisfaction, the artist’s statement and the ideas he’s shared about his creations demonstrate profound meaning. See, for a dummy like me, it’s a little intimidating.
Allen, a McGuffey member since 2011, says that his penciled paper and canvas pieces contend with “the nature of the self and the pressures of context.” His autobiographical discoveries invite viewers to consider their own identities, too. This lofty impulse is advanced through an upcycling of public domain, commercial, and personal images, recontextualized in graphite. He then couples his visuals with hand-cut, stenciled letters on a grid, spelling out his poetry in vertical streaks without space between the lines, often mirroring itself in a backward orientation. Though difficult to read, Allen accurately notes that his texts, which harbor some likely unintentional resemblance to Gee Vaucher’s protest art for anarcho-punk band Crass, look “at once ancient and modern.”
These bi-media pieces require us to consider the meaning of the words, as well as the images. There is little doubt that a casual Friday night art crawl won’t suffice, nor will the half-buzzed gallery stroll-through that might otherwise do the job for art proffered without paired poems. This takes time. Muttering your knee-jerk Rorschach test appraisals to the person next to you won’t cut it here.
Check out the titles—even they demand explanation: “Sequela,” “Scotoma,” “Albedo,” “Anamorph.” The good news is that, for three dollars, you can get a chapbook of sorts, where conventional presentations of Allen’s poetry are served with definitions of the unfamiliar language he’s chosen for his works’ names. Honestly, his verse provides more shocking imagery than his visuals, ornamented with terrors like deformed spider parent domination, town-crushing giants from childhood, and a recurring theme of relatives performing mutilations on each other.
The sinister elements that arise in his penciled canvases are more muted: an arrogant bather tilting aggressively in the surf, the confrontational gaze of a man among a gaggle of unhappy children, a stunned Red Riding Hood scrutinizing a contented wolf dozing in her grandmother’s clothing.
The show’s first piece, “Sequela,” features a type of self-portrait bust bisected by a vertical stream of text; the subject wears an unsettling white paper mask with holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. The mask itself hangs on the backside of the wall above the poem, “Vault.” The three-part text tells of wandering into a dense forest, referencing wolves and birds, animals that reappear in the aforementioned fable piece “Albedo,” and the perched bird of “Anamorph.” It’s an intricate pattern of meaning that no brief review has space enough to explore.
Viewers of Allen’s third solo McGuffey show will be taken by the explosive monochromatic beauty of “Zoetrope,” which extends across multiple panels, snaking around two walls. Allen says the idea for the work originated 40 years earlier, when as a college student, he would shoot photos on the train to New York for museum visits. It concerns his idea of time and space interacting as parts of the same illusion that obscures the viewers’ sense of location and ability to interpret what’s being observed. “Zoetrope”’s silhouettes, cloud bursts, rays of sunlight, windows, reflections, and waves of smoke make it impossible to tell.
Though Allen leaves us ample instructions for understanding his influences, ideas, and objectives, following him for the entire journey takes chutzpah. But, for those of us willing to take on the challenge, the rewards are many.
Our voices bounce back at us as we speak. I’m one street over from the Downtown Mall in Megan Read’s studio, and it, like her paintings, has an uncluttered spaciousness about it.
Older finished works line part of a wall, and paintings in progress are set up at various heights on another. But the rest of the space lies mostly bare. Shiny wooden floors gleam. Pristine brick walls rise. A kitchenette area in the far corner poses as if it were part of a brand-new model home where no one has or might ever dare to cook, eat, or sip.
As I lower the microphone level on my handheld recorder to a safer setting, it occurs to me that this is the most immaculate art studio I’ve ever seen in my life.
Read explains that she hasn’t been working here all that long, hence the emptiness. Still, her studio could be held up as exemplary for many, an endgame that’s defined the early part of 2019: The Year to Seriously Clean House. The popularity of Marie Kondo has spurred a zeitgeist for living a clutter-free life shared only with the bare essentials (or at least those that “spark joy,” as Kondo says), and reassessing the importance of the objects we bring into our homes.
For Read, a tidy space is imperative. She says that she gets overwhelmed easily and feels stressed when engaging with a heavy sensory load. When I ask what the inside of her house looks like, she recounts the large lot of stuff she has, but notes that it stays contained, with curios like bird bones and nests stored in their proper places alongside more functional belongings like glassware.
Her works reflect this intrinsic need for unobstructed surroundings, and are partially responsible for her return to creating after multiple, years-long periods away from making art. After nearly a decade of suffering from depression and avoiding most human contact, Read used painting as a way to cycle through her own mental difficulties and to connect with others, both in showing her work and finding like-minded artists online. The act of painting continues to provide solace.
“A lot of the things I’ve been painting are about making quiet spaces for me,” she says. “And that’s also part of the reason I started drawing in the first place—and then painting again. It’s a break from all of the chaos. It’s a time where I don’t feel like I’m supposed to do anything else. There isn’t stuff coming at me and I don’t worry that I’m not doing the right thing, which for someone who is anxious, is a nice feeling.”
That feeling of detached simplicity is captured within paintings that are equally undisturbed by any mess. But as opposed to her bright studio, many of her pieces are rooted in a chiaroscuro treatment where figures appear coolly lit, emerging from a depth of field concealed in darkness, a heavily shadowed world without end.
Megan Read in her studio, Sanjay Suchak
Read’s new works for the upcoming show “OBJECTify,” opening at Second Street Gallery on Friday, April 5, with veteran local artist Michael Fitts, further explores her penchant for female subjects with obscured faces who occupy sparse environments—almost always with a few carefully chosen possessions.
As in earlier works like “Becoming,” whichfeatured a woman blindfolded by an Adidas headband, and “Furling,” which depicted a female figure holding up a pair of Nike sneakers by their laces, these new paintings commingle touches reminiscent of Old World, romantic nudes crossed with slices of hyperrealist visions. The overall effect may be, at times, disarmingly photographic, but Read contends that achieving photorealism isn’t her concern.
Read constructs images in Photoshop, which then function as rough working models for her paintings. But she insists there are major differences between the staging that she creates in software and the finished pieces.
“It’s funny, there are people who will see my stuff and be like, ‘Oh my god, it’s so realistic!’ But I pick details to put in. I will put in a bunch of actual hairs on the head and more wrinkles on the hands and feet. Otherwise, I don’t really care,” she says.
Driven by an urge to recreate what she sees in her mind, she’s less concerned with any message that her paintings might contain, and motivated by a subconscious pull toward perfecting the natural grace of the figure’s position. While her newer works’ main female subject co-stars with a finch, and in one case, a peacock, there are also a few select possessions: a tapestry, an iPhone, and a pair of surprisingly sunny yellow shoes that Read says she has in five colors, noting that she owns all the footwear in her paintings.
Shoes have become an ongoing trope that Read consciously incorporates. The aforementioned Nikes appear in multiple works. She admits that purchase was aspirational, since it took her 10 years to start wearing them after first bringing them home, harboring a wish to be the kind of person who would wear the suede Sprint Sister model.
“Actually, when I started painting them, I got to the point in my life where I stopped worrying about what people think and decided that I can wear bright blue sneakers,” she says. “My feet are the only place where I wear bright colors. They just seem to be representative of the way you want to present yourself. I think the shoes people wear say a lot.”
So while she’s adamant that she doesn’t choose the objects in her paintings for any symbolic reason, there may be something to what she says about the possessions already conveying specific messages. It makes sense. As a society, we like our things to say something about who we are.
But on the whole, Read tries not to ruminate too much on the items that find their way into her works. She lets her energies guide the process.
“Usually by the end, I start having thoughts about why I chose to put things there in the first place. And some of the choices start to make more sense. I think that there are themes I see repeating themselves that I am certainly not sitting down and planning out, but they just keep happening.”
The elements that recur in her paintings include hidden female faces, articles of women’s clothing, birds, and technology. If there is an overarching theme, it is a conflict between who we are, who we want to be, and what we wish for ourselves. Read’s works envision an inner strength, resilience, and the potential of freedom, but also reveal weakness in the face of all that life demands. They demonstrate a comfort with our own bodies, but also uncover the threat of doubt and, perhaps, a weakness to hold on to those mere things—favorite shoes, the ubiquitous cellphone—that have also come to define us.
Michael Fitts in his studio. Photo: Sanjay Suchak
I’m really not sure how Michael Fitts can work like this.
His counterpart in the “OBJECTify” exhibition could probably park an SUV in her studio, but he paints in much closer quarters.
Fitts is partly to blame for his condition. An ever-growing collection of what is usually dismissed as junk—toy parts, game pieces, food wrappers, vintage oil cans, and 40-year-old drug store staples—monopolizes the room. These are the items that feature in his work. He crouches under a lamp, mere inches from the floor, hunched in a kneeling position that resembles religious prostration. His setup looks extremely uncomfortable. By nightfall, the studio is mostly dark, barring the penetrating spotlight focus of the work bulb, and increasingly restrictive thanks to the tenuous heaps of his amassed stuff.
The artifacts from his paintings peek out of the piles. They recall moments of a 1970s upbringing among dad’s hardware detritus, mom’s dress patterns, and after-school candy store splurges. You might think he would feel overwhelmed by the amount of accumulated clutter in his studio, and he admits that it’s started to encroach on the work area he’s carved out in the center of the room. Yet for all of the chaos, he’s got his own system of organization and he’s determined to hold on to the bulk of his stuff.
“Some of it I’ve let go. But over the years, I’ve started keeping it. I did a painting of a popcorn box once when I was getting started, and after I finished it, I threw the box away. Then I sold that painting and I wanted to do it again. So after that I just started keeping everything—unless it’s something like a melting chocolate bar that I can just buy again. I have everything that I’ve painted.”
Michael Fitts’ “McCall’s 4183,” 2019, oil on copper
His reasons for collecting what others might toss stems from a sincere hope that he will capture it later in his art. The works Fitts has planned for the Second Street show continue his fascination with recreating singular items on metal “canvases,” in this case copper—perhaps a link to his former life as a sign painter. Like Read, he tries not to overthink the process of what possessions he chooses to paint or their potential meaning.
His works are simple: one painting, one object. But they have effectively stirred emotional responses for years. They are depictions of things, yes, recognizable and perhaps mundane, but by no means devoid of deep emotive qualities. Fitts’ art nails down what might otherwise blow into the trees. He holds these disposable items up as emblems of a time when his future was untethered by responsibility, and his universe was packaged in the vibrant comfort of brands you could trust. He is a master of reproducing mid-to-late-20th-century artifacts with the far-reaching power of recalling our secret remembrances and cherished dreams of youth.
As Americans, that longing to own stuff —and the sentiments those things elicit—reveals a commercialism that tends to get tied to trademarks. When I mention that both he and his fellow “OBJECTify” artist often display brand names in their art, Fitts says he strove to paint more generic objects in the past. But he stopped thinking about the potential impact of trademarked corporate names and logos when he opted to follow a Pop Art aesthetic. It frees him to reframe whatever he fancies as a work of art without ascribing any secondary meaning. “I like to try to strip away as much narrative as I possibly can,” he says.
He’s also keenly aware that he’s not the first to appropriate consumer goods and that duplicating the artful packaging that covers them follows a Warhol-like tradition, perhaps best described by a friend calling him a “Pop Realist.”
Whereas Read’s hyperrealism and product placement are byproducts of a therapeutic painting process for calming her mind, Fitts is motivated by the act of copying his subject with machine-like accuracy—and without affecting the object of his interest by injecting his own interpretation of it. That goal is the consequence of a long art career that was never built upon his imagination. Years ago, he painted in an abstract style for a period, but for him, the less concrete compositions took considerably more effort.
“Abstract art is so much harder, because you’re trying to let something flow out of you, whereas I’m just painting a Q-Tip box. You don’t really need an artistic mind. The artistic mind part is concept.”
With paintings like “Skate,” “Box of Chocolates,” and “Potato Chips,” it’s nearly impossible to believe that Fitts doesn’t find the whole thing a bit funny. But the VCU graphic design school grad swears that he is completely genuine about what he does and expects to be taken seriously. And he definitely should be, as even if some of it is a bit of a laugh, Fitts’ works’ comic potency never belies ingenious artistic concepts and an exceptional capability for accuracy.
“I did a painting a couple of years ago of a Heinz ketchup packet that had been stomped on, with the ketchup splattered. People thought it was hilarious. And it was, but I don’t even know why. Other times, I’ve had people ask, ‘What made you think that you could do a Pond’s Cold Cream as a painting?’ And again, I don’t know. That’s the mystery. The rest of it is just execution,” he says.
Fitts’ “Skate,” 2019, oil on copper
“I’m not that creative,” Read says shrugging. It’s an odd self-assessment, but a cutting and introspective viewpoint she shares with how Fitts sees himself. It’s also another reason that pairing the two for the Second Street show makes sense beyond the skillful photographic accuracy they produce with their brushes.
Strangely, “OBJECTify” is the culmination of many real-life narrative threads that came to light when Read first hung her piece “Resistance/Resilience,” a painting of a nude woman dropping hay for a sheep.
“My wife and I used to walk every morning to get coffee at Mudhouse,” Fitts recalls. “We walked in there and saw Megan’s painting and I was like, ‘What the hell is this?!’ I hadn’t ever seen anyone in Charlottesville doing anything like she was doing. So new, unusual, and well-executed. I thought it could easily be at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.”
He reached out to her, and the two met. She recalls being ecstatic that she was going to be having a conversation with someone she considered a real artist. As it turned out, when Read was first learning to paint at 16—in the same building that houses her new studio—she saw Fitts’ art at Mudhouse and had her own epiphany: “Holy shit—that’s what I want to do!” she recalls thinking. “I feel like that’s exactly what should be made. I want to make exactly what he’s making.”
Clearly, Read’s artistic journey veered from Fitts’, but they are both capable of faultless execution and an uncanny ability to render stunning detail with brushstrokes.
Fitts recalls that Read was concerned about filling the walls for a show she was planning, and he offered to “take up some of the space.” Right around the same time, Second Street’s executive director and chief curator Kristen Chiacchia approached the artists about producing a joint exhibition at the nonprofit gallery. It was a serendipitous moment.
“It’s Second Street’s mission to bring the best contemporary art to central Virginia—and in this case, I didn’t have to search far,” says Chiacchia. “Charlottesville has two local artists working in the New Precisionist style of painting equal to what’s currently being shown in top galleries in New York.”
“Flowers Without Vessel,” by Megan Read, 2018, oil on linen.
And how do the artists expect their new works to be received? Undoubtedly, people will gasp at the trompe l’oeil realness that Read and Fitts serve. Yet they each hope viewers will freely give their paintings the meanings that they’ve left for them to convey on their behalf.
Read says she imagines that because of her paintings’ intentional emptiness, what does remain are reliable targets for accepting the emotional projection of any invested viewer. She cites a touching moment when a woman justified an urgent exit by noting that her male companion began welling up at “Resistance/Resilience.”
“I definitely don’t want to make people cry, but it makes me really happy that somebody had a moment,” Read says. “That’s really what I want: people to have a moment that’s meaningful for them.”
In Fitts’ estimation, his paintings’ lack of narrative leaves a wide berth for others to call back to their own childhood memories and hit a soft spot. He says that those endless opportunities for what each object might recall for viewers is his raison d’être.
Now his only concern is that his part of the show holds up to Read’s.
“I told Megan that I hope I can keep from embarrassing myself when I look at what she’s doing.” He considers how their work diverges: “Hers definitely has a dark, psychologically tortured feel,” Fitts says, pausing to chuckle, “whereas mine is like…oil can.”
But the things that capture our attention resonate in ways unimagined. Read and Fitts will likely be surprised when they discover the meanings viewers bestow on their latest paintings, strangers stepping closer to scrutinize their artistry, mentally taking possession of things that, once seen, immediately belong to all of us.
Chris Johnston (left) plays the role of Black Will and John Harrell (right) is Shakebag in ASC’s Arden of Faversham. Photo by Lauren Rogers Parker
“Comfort thyself, sweet friend; it is not strange / That women will be false and wavering.”—Franklin, Arden of Faversham (Act 1, scene 1)
Maybe the scheduling was merely coincidental, but witnessing the debut performance of the early modern true-crime drama Arden of Faversham on International Women’s Day felt particularly wrong—and perhaps more comical because of it.
The anonymously written 1592 play, which in recent years has gained extra traction by crediting Shakespeare with co-authorship, remains remarkable for the depiction of one of England’s most infamous domestic tragedies, capturing a snapshot of real-world 1551 news. It’s a simple story of a lady desperate to get out of a rut: cheating wife schemes with lover to kill husband. Though the pair enlist a pack of self-interested conspirators and criminals to complete the task, each proves incompetent until near the very end of the play.
Is this straightforward work about ordinary citizens shedding blood a rare artifact about smashing the patriarchy? Did the American Shakespeare Center’s actor-led Renaissance winter season choose the play because of its frighteningly strong female lead character? Sure, the plot-propelling decision to off a husband could be taken as the ultimate expression of self-empowerment, but even the most progressive people would agree there are less severe alternatives for fixing an unsatisfying marriage than stabbing.
Alice Arden, the wife in question, is no role model—and like any great villainess, her evil disposition is what makes the piece exceptional. Played with mischievous conviction by Abbi Hawk, Alice is the sultry femme-fatale mastermind who ultimately sees her darkest wish satisfied. Behind lipstick smiles and on crossed coquettish legs, she flaunts humanity’s worst traits, those which ignorant women-haters have feared and contradictorily ascribed to the fair sex for ages: deceitfulness, capriciousness, emotional weakness, gross lust, and cold cruelty. And though it is her murdered husband Thomas for whom the play is named, her lover Mosby who hatches the last successful plan, and the retaliatory former tenant Greene who employs the hoodlums Black Will and Shakebag, Alice is clearly the one running this bitch.
Arden of Faversham may have originally been a drama—complete with requisite Elizabethan morality dooming the majority of the cast to death for their savagery and willful rebellion against the strict English hierarchy. But centuries of aging have left Arden ripe for a comedic take.
Self-costumed to the nines in threads echoing those 1930s white-gloved escapist movies about dancing urbanite aristocrats, the ASC cast squeezes yucks from the text with exquisite smoothness. Deftly, the actors freak out, fall off stage, howl in shock, and deliver deadpan looks and sly over-the-shoulder glances at the audience with precise comic timing.
As the straight men in this drama-reimagined-as-black-comedy, David Anthony Lewis mops up our pity as helpless Arden, while Rick Blunt, as Arden’s close friend Franklin, is convincingly serious and well- meaning as the voice of reason.
The ne’er-do-wells are equally wonderful. Benjamin Reed as aggravated Mosby brings rage to the role, fluctuating between anger with Alice, their adulterous situation, and the dumb luck that keeps her husband alive. Chris Johnston’s spastic, short-fused, hired henchman Black Will is mined for a fortune of clownish frenetics, and is nearly outdone by John Harrell’s rich Shakebag; pointedly played with a cartoonish wise guy accent, Harrell does genius work as the thuggish yutz. No less riotous, KP Powell in the role of devilish painter Clarke offers up big laughs from his preposterous murder formulas to his side-splitting use of protective glasses.
Despite the historically accurate laxness of being free to kick back with a few beers during the show, there’s still an unspoken reverence framing the ASC experience that was gleefully absent during this latest production. Though the cast and crew always put forth honest efforts to loosen everyone up, the atmosphere in the seats can feel a little like going to church or having been urged into a field trip by an uncomfortably familiar English professor. You notice it most when the jokes, swirled up in iambic poetics and murky 500-year-old slang, prompt the loudest audience members to crow more like they’re showing everyone how smart they are by “getting it” rather than how much of a good time they’re having. Arden is different.
No, the play doesn’t generate any PR for the virtuosity and righteousness of women, but that’s hardly the point. Arden excels thanks to the ASC cast’s inventive way with the words, and they are funnier than hell. I haven’t laughed as hard since the last time I watched Kathleen Turner prank call Mink Stole in John Waters’ Serial Mom. Could be that I just find female killers hysterical, but please don’t let my personal issues deter you from driving over to Staunton for a great time at Blackfriars.
American Shakespeare Center’s Henry IV, Part 1 follows King Henry Bolingbroke’s (David Anthony Lewis) mounting tensions with a rebel alliance and an estranged heir.
Lindsey Walters
To a lay audience member who hasn’t been involved in a theater production since fifth grade, directors seem as essential to any play’s success as a script. They’re the boss of the show. If the director goes into a coma at the start of the first rehearsal or has a crisis and runs off with the box office manager, what sharp-eyed, astute-eared taskmaster keeps everyone and everything in line?
During the annual Actors’ Renaissance winter season at Staunton’s American Shakespeare Center, it’s completely up to the players to get their proverbial acts together.
It’s no small challenge. Roughly 13 actors are responsible for 79 roles through the course of four plays: darkly hilarious Early Modern true crime bonanza Arden of Faversham; Amy E. Witting’s new piece Anne Page Hates Fun; Shakespeare’s domestic sitcom The Merry Wives of Windsor; and the revered second installment of his historical tetralogy, Henry IV, Part 1.
On the well-lit stage of the enchanting Blackfriars Playhouse last month, the acting company previewed their work on Henry IV, Part 1. The January 24 debut performance revealed completely actor-made choices on staging—down to the costume design, music, props, and the minutiae that would otherwise fall under a director’s purview. And on top of that, the actors had learned their lines in under 10 days.
Why suffer so? According to the ASC, the yearly test aims to empower the players by giving them the “unique blend of scholarship and practice” necessary for undertaking the “deepest dive into the Elizabethan era.” And despite the potential for chaos, it syncs perfectly with the ASC’s respectful and historically guided approach.
The result of leaving the direction of Henry IV, Part 1 to those performing in it is not unlike the best kind of self-released punk rock record: rolling on a steady current of gross humor, powered by blasts of lusty rage, true to the intent of those involved, and peppered with thrilling, unexpected turns. Performances hit the pinnacle of emotive perfection or, in some cases, sail just beyond the well-intentioned grasp of those outsized by their desire to execute.
The script follows King Henry Bolingbroke’s mounting tensions with a rebel alliance fueled by hotheaded Hotspur, and tackles the monarch’s estranged relationship with his heir, Hal the Prince of Wales. After Hal grows out of his frivolous London tavern lifestyle—and tomfoolery with his scene-stealing, boozehound buddy Sir John Falstaff—the young noble assumes his rightful place at his father’s side. Together, Hal and King Henry lead an army that puts down the upstarts seeking to overthrow the crown.
While the play is named after the highest rung on the hierarchy, it could easily bear the name of any of the aforementioned key roles, as each has more to say than the titular character. Yet in reenacting this embattled royal, David Anthony Lewis commands the performance with resonant authority and manly poise. Instinctive, unstudied, and wholly convincing, he seems more comfortable with Shakespeare’s words than anyone else in the play. If some of the production’s choices skirt the border of questionable interpretation, there is zero doubt in Lewis’ Henry.
Henry’s problematic princely son is played with a cautious focus by Brandon Carter, who became more at ease as his character grew fully self-aware in the play’s latter half. It’s possible that Carter’s smooth-voiced delivery is marked by tentative restraint since he’s sharing many scenes with the comedic bulldozer and big-bellied bravado of John Harrell’s Falstaff. The latter’s costume choices paint Sir John as a ’90s grunge wash-up, complete with bandana, Nirvana tee, combat boots, and requisite plaid shirt—tucked over a fat-suit paunch. Despite being a bit young and thin in the limbs for the lovable drunk liar, Harrell is appropriately slurry, sloppy, cowardly, and as hysterical as anyone could hope.
Another of the King’s major headaches, rebel leader Hotspur, is set afire with an irrepressible rage by KP Powell. Cocksure and indignant, the charismatic Powell only relents from boiling over when he’s in the lap of coquettish Lady Percy; as played by Abbi Hawk, she charmingly presents Hotspur’s wife as sultry and impossibly headstrong. Powell and Hawk display authentic chemistry during the play’s few romantic moments.
But as Henry IV, Part 1 is built on barroom banter and war, zingers and vengeful aggression frame Prince Hal’s journey from loaf to promising successor; ultimately, the Actors’ Renaissance finds its best staging choices in the slapstick of the tavern and botched vaudevillian thieveries. Putting the full Blackfriar’s space to excellent use, the actors hurdle the seats, scramble up the aisles to escape the stage, and Hal even chugs from a beer bong hanging off of the second-floor balcony. And though the too- careful, slo-mo choreography of the final act’s sword fighting could use tightening up, the group prevailed thanks to its nimble humor, righteous ire, and genuinely poignant performances.
