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Arts

ASC’s She Stoops To Conquer stands on comic timing

With a tilt of her head and a cascade of red curls, Kate Hardcastle considered her suitor across stage. “You’re so great a favorite there, you say?”

“Yes, my dear,” Young Charles Marlow grinned, determined to prove to this beautiful barmaid his popularity at the Ladies Club. Swaggering toward the stage right audience, he looked us up and down. “There’s Mrs. Mantrap,” he said and gave me a knowing wink. “Lady Betty Blackleg, the Countess of Sligo…”

I missed his list of supposed conquests as I turned the color of Miss Hardcastle’s curls.

We think of escapism in cinematic terms, as a requisite plunge into blackness that trains all our senses on flickering projection and a big screen. At the American Shakespeare Center, the world itself changes. Universal lighting, a Shakespearean staging condition, means the lights never dim. The show never stops, and you, delicate audience member, are part of the script.

In the ASC’s production of the 1773 comedy She Stoops to Conquer, the fourth wall was gone and I was the butt of playwright Oliver Goldsmith’s jokes. Not for long, of course, because Marlowe had yet to realize the barmaid he courted was actually the gentlewoman to whom he was betrothed—the same Miss Hardcastle whose elegance and good standing made him so nervous he hardly spoke to her.

In a three-sentence summary, the plot of She Stoops sounds suspiciously antiquated. A young man’s modesty fails to charm the lady in whose home he comes to court. The hero’s impudence incenses the young lady’s father when he mistakes the gentleman for an innkeeper. Throw in a scheming cousin, her lover, a mischievous stepbrother, and…hilarity ensues?

Yes. Yes it does.

Lest you think I’m the sort of English major who LOLs at Chaucer, know that Goldsmith’s pithy script belies its 250 years. Snappy dialogue uncovers contemporary concepts like true love, strong women, and overbearing stepparents. The writer termed it a “laughing comedy,” which director and ASC co-founder Jim Warren described as “amusing rather than telling an audience what to feel; it reveals man’s ridiculousness rather than his distresses” and, in a departure from typical 18th century tropes, “often spoofs and lampoons elements of sentimentalism.” No shrinking violets or dashing rakes here (not in the typical genders, anyway). She Stoops to Conquer offers a brand of humor both fresh and side-splitting, especially in Warren’s modern incarnation.

While certain turns of phrase may be more at home in the 18th than 21st century, Warren and his professional troupe use every tool at their disposal to translate for a modern audience, including arched eyebrows, funny voices, and contemporary cadence. Every gesture and squint and unhappy frown hits with tightly choreographed comic timing.

As the long-married-and-suffering Mr. Hardcastle, Benjamin Curns does not bear his strife in silence. He strides around condemning impudence and frippery, building steam like a teakettle or Steve Martin in Father of the Bride.

Allison Glenzer, his wife, uses physical comedy to great effect. Pursed lips, slumped shoulders, a mincing gait tell us as much as her high-pitched affectations or heaving fury.

Lee Fitzpatrick, who plays the spunky Miss Hardcastle, convinces us that she’s both in love and somehow in on the joke, and her multi-faced suitor, Gregory Jon Phelps, transforms in an instant from mumbling boy to libidinous man.

As spoiled Hardcastle heir Tony Lumpkin, John Harrell is by turns perfectly annoying and annoyed, throwing small tantrums and leading drinking songs with lyrics like I hate this place/And your stupid face/But it’s better than drinking alone. I especially loved it when he and his cousin Constance Neville, played by the talented Emily Brown, bickered and slapped at each other like siblings until forced to pretend to be in love.

The obvious talent of its 12-person troupe dawns on you when you realize these actors fill every role in the season’s five plays. In addition to playing multiple characters—
a.k.a. “doubling,” another Shakespearean condition—each actor can sing or play instruments, performing songs before, during, and after the show from a narrow balcony above the stage.

A live soundtrack that starts before the audience enters is only one way in which the Blackfriars Playhouse feels like nowhere else. Wooden hoops propping up candles are suspended as chandeliers from the ceiling; stadium-style chairs flank three sides of the stage. As the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theater, the building “draws audiences to the Shenandoah Valley from all over the world, year-round,” said ASC marketing manager Christina Sayer Grey.

Twenty-five years after its inception, the ASC is completing its first full cycle of Shakespeare’s 38-play canon with this winter’s production of Timon of Athens. Despite the company’s dedication to the Bard, each ASC season includes non-Shakespearean works. When selecting 2013’s mix of comedy and tragedy, Grey said, “we thought that the madcap feel of the show would fit right in with the celebratory feel of the whole 25th anniversary year.”

The company was right. She Stoops to Conquer is not only clever, but fun—the sort of show that makes your cheeks hurt. Spared soupy sentimentalism, this romance is a romp, one that upends classic conditions and propels the plot with delight. We meet a heroine who liberates her hero and another who refuses to flee, choosing to face her and her lover’s enemy face-to-face.

As I perched on my stool, watching Marlow strut by, I felt the blood move in my cheeks. His misdirected charm, Miss Hardcastle’s irony, the way we held our breaths for the next punch line: I believed this was theater as Shakespeare and Goldsmith intended it, immersion to amuse and prompt self-awareness. In the round of our minds, we’re all drinking alone, but this was so much better.

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Arts

PVCC reaches out to the community for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

When Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an absurdist comedy about two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he was only 27 years old. Trapped in a nebulous otherworld, courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern debate the nature of freedom and fate from lives pre-scripted to death. Comic dialogue coupled with philosophical themes, including the use of language to uncover and confound reality, helped crystalize the playwright’s style and earned him the 1968 Tony Award for Best Play. Now students at Piedmont Virginia Community College and members of the Charlottesville acting community bring their own youthful energy and seasoned sagacity to a one-weekend performance November 13-17.

Veteran director and theater faculty member at Mary Baldwin College, Clinton Johnson chose Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as PVCC’s winter offering because the show is one of his all-time favorites. “You don’t get many absurdist comedies, but they tend to be very smart and very funny,” Johnson said. “Usually shows about Shakespeare or that re-work Shakespeare end up working against it. Stoppard manages to not be precious with the original material while still maintaining a clear love for it.”

Stoppard’s close readings of the Bard weave throughout the play. Isolated from Hamlet, which presumably runs offstage, the titular courtiers struggle to find meaning in a decontextualized nowhere land. PVCC echoes this strangeness with a sparse set and vomitorium staging, in which two groups of audience members face each other across a strip of stage bracketed by darkness.

As a result, attendees become part of the dramatic experience. “The audience spends a lot of time seeing each other and one another’s responses,” said Brad Stoller, PVCC’s new coordinator of theatrical productions, a choice that underscores the show’s investigation of “human existence and why we’re here.”

With a cast and crew that include both student and community performers, PVCC’s production is part of a new model in community theater. “The idea is that young actors learn best from other actors,” said Stoller, who took helm of the program in 2012. Faced with the reality that many PVCC students juggle children, jobs, and commutes to school and do not have time to rehearse full-length plays, the PVCC drama department decided to open auditions to the public. “As long as we have at least a half and half split with plays,” Stoller said, “I’ve been given the go ahead to let people in the community join the community college. Which makes sense to me.”

PVCC auditions draw local performers of all ages, many of whom have been acting their entire lives. These days, veterans fill many major roles while students learn the ropes, but as time passes and students return to the program, Stoller expects the ratio to shift.

In the meantime, he believes this mentoring process gives students an unprecedented opportunity for a hands-on theater experience. “Traditional programs can be insular,” Stoller said. “I had to wait until my third and fourth years to get any technical experience, and the only reason I got cast in roles is because I was a dancer. Come to PVCC, and you can be part of all aspects of theater right away.”

Stoller approaches each show as a producer, selecting expert directors who choose the shows for which PVCC holds open auditions. “A director knows what they love and want to direct,” he said. “As long as it’s something a community college can do—age and budget-wise—we’ll do it.”

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is complex, designed to unhinge a viewer’s perspective so insight can pour through the cracks. The quick back-and-forths that delight Stoppard fans also require actors to master specific verbal and physical work while maintaining a grasp of the script’s complex logic. “It’s almost as demanding as farce,” Johnson said of the show’s mind-boggling details. “‘First you flip the coin, and then I say this, and then you catch it, and then I look.’”

For this reason, Johnson appreciates PVCC’s new model. “We’ve been able to pull in some people whom I consider to be heavy hitters for this show,” he said. “I mean, you learn theater by doing it, and you really learn by doing it with people who’ve done more than you. I think it’s good for these students to see how seriously these community members take what they do on stage.”

Courtiers, actors, audience members, we all have questions about the roles we play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead may not provide all the answers, but as Johnson said of PVCC’s production, “Two young men in average health can get into a surprising number of sexual positions in three minutes and 33 seconds. I give you that piece of knowledge for free.”

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Arts

Filmmaker and actor Brian Wimer on freedom in expression

“There’s a point in Peter Pan when Peter and Wendy are pretending to be parents to the Lost Boys. Peter says, ‘Are we playing or is this real?’ Wendy says, ‘Oh it’s a game, but it’s real.’ Eventually Peter says, ‘I’m tired of playing this game, let’s play a different one.’ But that’s the reality of our lives. We’re all playing roles.”

Brian Wimer paused. I watched the co-director of the Virginia Film Festival’s center-piece movie, CLAW, and star of Faux Paws, a VFF film about two werewolf lovers on the lam, adjust my recorder on his knee. I felt acutely aware of my reporter’s posture: perched on the edge of my chair, nodding while typing.

He smiled, blue eyes bright under wild curls. “People may think that someone starring in X-Men at Regal Cinema is the actor, but no. Every one of you is a character and a role, and you have a script,” he commented.

A drama major in college, Wimer credits his philosophy in part to the surrealist Theater of Cruelty and plays by Antonin Artaud, Eugène Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. “You’d walk away with a lot of questions,” Wimer said. “But that alternate reality on stage was somehow more vital than your own.”

More vital than the corporate life Wimer lived after college—10 years spent in advertising, developing print, TV, and radio campaigns for brands like Citibank and Snapple. “I was always looking for something different,” he said. “Advertising promotes things you don’t need. Art supplies, often for free, something that life is lacking and truly lacking.”

After a marriage to a Yugoslavian woman at the height of the Balkan Wars and time traveling overseas, Wimer discovered a new way to pull back the curtain on reality: independent filmmaking. “I don’t want to create movies that people walk out from and say ‘O.K., that was two hours of entertainment, now let’s go eat a piece of cake’,” Wimer said. “You want to create a piece of entertainment that a little bit changes their lives.”

Wimer’s features and shorts have appeared in past Virginia Film Festivals, often as part of the Adrenaline Film Project, the 72-hour filmmaking competition in which three-person teams write, cast, shoot, edit and screen films. Despite jury and audience awards for some of his Adrenaline films, however, the high profile status of CLAW at this year’s festival came, he said, as “a very welcome happy surprise.”

CLAW is a feature-length documentary that follows the growth of the Collective of Lady Arm Wrestlers from its origins in Charlottesville to 25 cities around the world. The brainchild of Wimer, photographer and filmmaker Billy Hunt, and actor and CLAW co-founder Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell, the film, like the movement, is an exercise in collaboration: shared cameras, time bank swaps, and sleeping on foreign couches.

While support networks allow independent filmmakers to create high-quality movies on relatively low budgets, collaborative direction isn’t so easy. “Us creative types often have huge egos, so it can be difficult for us to play well with others,” Wimer said. As co-directors on CLAW, Wimer and Hunt did not share aesthetics—Wimer is prone to non-sequiturs, and Hunt “is a lot more linear”—but they respected one another’s criticism and managed to agree on over five cuts of the film.

“The movie’s not perfect, but CLAW itself is not perfect. That’s part of the beauty of it. You could plan everything perfectly, but someone could break an arm.” Part philanthropy, part pageantry, and part sport, lady arm wrestling “isn’t scripted,” Wimer pointed out. “We try to keep some of that spirit in the film, of you don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

The story of CLAW’s incredible growth is one of speed bumps, personality clashes, and yes, injuries. Flour-slinging housewives, pregnant brides, and giant bananas: the free wheeling strangeness that whips crowds into frenzies made choosing a narrative “like playing Tetris or something.” Wimer and Hunt needed to analyze the themes of a women’s empowerment movement, which some participants thought two men couldn’t do, and they needed to identify the film’s antagonist. Wrestlers smack-talked and fought, of course, but they also saw CLAW as a big sisterhood. So what were the women really struggling against?

“To a certain extent it’s the state of genders today. It’s the world of men, but it’s also the stereotypes that women have allowed themselves to be stuck into,” Wimer said. “The theme that I found was women acting out against the state of the world, regardless of whose fault it is.”

“Jen [Tidwell] will talk about a fourth wave of feminism, and others will talk about what feminism means to them,” Wimer said. “But I’m not a woman. I’m a white guy in America, and I’ve kind of got it made, and seeing these women act out in this way makes me understand their position and where they want to be.”

The playful freedom of CLAW allows women to be beautiful or gross, vulgar or prim, “to tackle their own demons about what they don’t like about themselves or the limits that have been put upon them,” Wimer said. By climbing on stage, a woman can celebrate any part of herself, from her mind to her butt to her muffin top, and exalt, however briefly, in freedom.

The same sense of freedom shows in Wimer’s on-camera work. “I didn’t give him much direction and much of that was on purpose,” said Doug Bari, the writer, director, and co-star of Faux Paws. “Brian does his best work, his most vulnerable work, when he flies by the seat of his pants a little.”

After four years at work on a script written with Wimer in mind, Bari began production of the film, which follows two werewolf lovers who flee from their lycanthrope reservation to werewolf-tolerant Maine with bounty hunters in pursuit. “Brian borders on being fearless,” Bari said. “And I knew he’d do anything we wanted him to.”

Which included sleeping in glued-on wolf hair for three days. “It’s weird and amazing,” Wimer said of the film. “I don’t think people could walk away and help but think about it.”

Films like Faux Paws and movements like CLAW may owe some of their success to the Charlottesville arts scene, which Kevin O’Donnell, a singer/songwriter and supporting actor in Faux Pas called “a haven where people’s dreams can be visualized and heard.” But even though self-expression “is welcomed and encouraged in this town,” day-to-day life still reflects social norms.

“As nice as Charlottesville is, we’re still searching for another reality that is more satisfying,” Wimer said. “When you walk into a place like CLAW, for those two hours you get to behave differently. You come away going, ‘Oh wow, how do I do that? How do I get the feeling of CLAW in my life?’ And it’s tough because it’s about not accepting the roles. At age 43, I can say that most of my life has been a role-playing game, and I want to start writing the script myself.”

He glanced out the window, at the sunlight and people milling past. “What do we want the story to end up saying? Is it a happy ending? Because we’re writing it right now. We’re writing it every day.” he said. 

 

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Living

Spirited away: An amateur’s foray into ghost hunting yields spooky results

Rain pattered against windows of the Court Square apartment where I sat in near-darkness, listening for ghosts. Two friends and I watched our lone light source, a candle, cast wavering gold on the ceiling.

We were alone in the living room, but we asked our questions out loud.

“Do you remember this kind of candlelight?” George said. “It’s just like it used to be, right?”

Outside a motorcycle roared past.

“Do you like playing with the flame?” He paused. “Can you make it brighter if you do?”

The flame appeared to shiver, to hiccup on the candle’s wick.

“I think we can see what you’re trying to do,” he said. “Do you like it when we talk to you? If so, can you do that again?”

We watched as the flame moved back and forth.

“I just got a chill,” George said under his breath.

“So did I,” Laura murmured. “Not like goose bumps, either. Like cold on the back of my neck…”

“Can you make it flicker really quickly?” I asked, leaning toward the light. “Make it move really fast back and forth?”

The flame suddenly whisked from side to side, throwing itself toward the rim of the jar. George grabbed my knee and we looked at each other, eyes wide.

Accidental tourist

The journey began several weeks earlier, when I’d met Rob Craighurst in Marco & Luca on the Downtown Mall. He looked exactly like the flag-bearing, bespectacled tour guide I’d seen on his business cards around town. He wasn’t wearing the top hat, but his thin face and thick mustache made me want to huddle up by a campfire and roast s’mores.

“I like telling stories,” Craighurst said. “About a decade ago, I went to Savannah to visit my daughter and took an excellent ghost tour there. That’s when it occurred to me that I could do one here.”

Craighurst recently rebranded his tour, which runs every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from May until October. He changed the name from “Ghosts and Mysteries” to “CSI: Cville 1904-style,” hoping that a modern whodunit approach would have more appeal than the spooked-out version. It may also be a more accurate title for the material his tour actually covers. “My tour isn’t scary,” Craighurst explained. “I talk a lot about the mayor and his wife.”

He related the story of the 1904 murder of Fannie McCue in her home, allegedly by her husband and former mayor, Samuel, who was the last man to be hanged in the courtyard of the Charlottesville jail.

“It raises questions about our criminal justice system, about the influence of the media on trial outcomes, about the death penalty and testimony witness,” he said. “If you’ve got a pulse, you’re thinking about it: What exactly is the truth?”

As Craighurst discussed America’s flawed justice system, my mind started to whisper: What about ghosts? Is criminal justice “haunting”? Could I justify a platter of dumplings?

Later, Craighurst told me that he’s never definitively experienced a ghost.

“I immediately assume there is a physical explanation,” he said. “But there are things that have happened that I cannot explain. Was it a ghost? I can’t say it wasn’t.”

I was surprised, a little disappointed, that someone who’d led 400-plus tours Downtown sounded ambivalent about spirits. I’m scared of dark basements, let alone former prisons, but when my editor pitched the idea of a ghost hunting story, I jumped at the chance to write it. I wanted to see the unseen world.

“Have the people on your tour ever seen ghosts?” I asked him.

“At least twice I’ve had people say they experienced a ghost,” he said. “One person said he saw it. Another said she felt the ghost. Both people saw it in the same place: the hospice house.”

I wrote it down. The site hadn’t been mentioned in the only book I found to detail local lore, The Ghosts of Charlottesville and Lynchburg and Nearby Environs by L.B. Taylor (Progress Printing Co., 1992). Of its 50 cases of psychic phenomena, only 10 were located in Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

“Do you know other places that might be haunted?” I asked.

Craighurst glanced at a cross-legged Buddha statue sitting on the counter, then pulled up a list on his laptop.

“People on tours share their stories with me,” he said.

I recognized several sites from my reading. Taylor told the story of mysterious humming at Monticello and the sound of spectral merrymaking at Michie Tavern. An antique rocking chair at Ash Lawn-Highland, no longer on display, was rumored to rock of its own accord. In the historic manor homes of Castle Hill and Castalia, wraith-like figures of women in period dress sent visitors fleeing their bedrooms. Other unexplained phenomena included latched doors opening, clothes and dishes scattering, mysterious footsteps, strange breezes, even a phantom horseback rider.

“Two people confirmed the story about Ash Lawn,” Craighurst said. “A night guard told me about Monticello. I’ve heard about things at the Inn at Court Square, even the old Woolworth’s building.”

When I looked back through my notes, I realized most of these sites were haunted by second- and third-hand rumors. How would I know which stories were true and which were warped like a game of telephone? Even Comyn Hall, Samuel McCue’s former home, could be confirmed by record only as the site of an unsolved murder. Not as a haunted house.

My mind swirled with questions as I bid Craighurst farewell and got in line for dumplings. What was I looking for? How could I find it? And even if I managed to get inside somewhere, to tear down the veil of the spirit world, what did I hope to prove?

As I chewed a fried pocket of pork, I decided to call the experts.

Ghost hunters

“Excuse me. Are you Team Twisted?”

A quiet girl with a lip ring and nervous fingers approached our table at Starbucks, glancing past me to the two men in dress shirts.

Lyle Lotts and Dickie Rexrode nodded proudly. The president and lead investigator, respectively, of Fishersville’s Twisted Paranormal Society, they offered gentle, seasoned advice to the girl,  who recounted strange occurrences in her dorm. I felt like I was hobnobbing with pop stars when the ghost hunters told her to burn a blessed peace candle, say Saint Michael’s prayer every day, and place Saint Michael’s coins in areas where she felt troubled.

“I will suggest one thing,” Rexrode said. “Don’t buy any equipment to communicate on your own.”

Equipment? Now we were getting somewhere. I imagined myself as a tall Nancy Drew, armed with a camera, a notebook, and whatever paranormal gauge Fox Mulder always pulled out of his trenchcoat on “The X-Files.”

“You’ve got to be trained,” Rexrode said. “Even with an audio recorder like she’s using with us. This isn’t like a little kid you can slap in the face—he could slap you right back. Don’t try it, I’m telling you. It’s for your own good.”

Wait, was this going to be dangerous? Classical music filled the silence as the girl walked away.

“They have some Wiccan practices going on there,” Lotts said. “Students practicing stuff they shouldn’t be. She feels that maybe they opened some stuff.”

“Some things feed off negative energy,” Rexrode told me. “There are good people and mean as hell people, and it’s the same with spirits. Mostly, though, they’re just like us. They don’t like to be upset.”

Lotts and Rexrode have the uncanny ability to put folks’ minds at ease. Out of every 100 people, they guessed, 85 admit to experiencing something unexplainable. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, since paranormal investigators are so common in Virginia that my first Google search found seven teams in Augusta, Albemarle, and Orange counties.

The prevalence of paranormal investigators in our area mirrors a booming national industry. The networking site MeetUp lists 173 ghost-hunting groups worldwide, with a total of 21,309 members to date. According to a CNN interview with Bill Wilkens, creator of ghost-hunter database paranormalsocieties.com, over 4,600 teams exist across the United States.

“We’re skeptics but we’ve got to be,” Lotts said. “We wouldn’t be good investigators if we weren’t.”

When someone contacts Team Twisted for help, he leads a small team walk-through to get a feel for the house and its history as well as the people in it.

“I’d say old wiring causes 90 percent of false alarms,” he told me. “Older homes have no grounding circuit, which gives off a lot of radiated frequency—electrical energy. People are real sensitive to electrical changes, the way static electricity makes your arm hair stand up.”

Rexrode nodded, adding, “We try to debunk most things, but there are a lot of things we can’t debunk.”

Every investigation has two goals: to monitor and locate spirits and to communicate with them. Success requires fine-tuned intuition as well as high-tech equipment. Rexrode and Lotts’ shortlist of tools includes digital voice recorders, which pick up the frequencies beyond human hearing in which ghosts can most often be heard; electromagnetic frequency meters, because ghosts are just bundles of electricity; special cameras to see in the dark; and REM Pods, which look like giant hockey pucks with glow sticks protruding from the tops.

A former Russian voice intercept with the U.S. Army, Lotts’ specialty is audio analysis. “But our favorite piece of equipment is the MII Flashcam,” Rexrode grinned. Used by U.S. Marshalls for night monitoring, the combination photo and video camera, audio recorder, and flashlight “has the best IR I’ve ever seen.”

Team Twisted built professional experience travelling up and down the East Coast. From private homes to national landmarks, every site allows team members to hone their technical, psychic, and communication skills—and take a break from their lives as doctors, nurses, and Toyota dealership managers.

Lotts acknowledged that despite long hours at hunts, having a day job is part of the deal. “We don’t charge for anything we do,” Rexrode said. “We joined to help people and that’s what we’re doing.”

If a home is troubled by mischievous spirits—ones that “aren’t really bad, just looking for attention”—the team performs a cleanse.

The peace process, designed to calm turbulent spirits and set homeowners’ minds at ease, is a mishmash of Christian and Native American rituals and can include burning sage (Albanian works best), burying blessed Saint Michael’s coins on the four corners of the property, using salt as a cleansing agent, and burning a blessed convent candle for seven days. They also pray—Psalm 23—and encourage homeowners to say Saint Michael’s prayer daily.

Under his fringe of blonde hair, Lotts’ brow creased. “We’re not psychiatrists or psychologists,” he said. “If you think you’re
dealing with demons, we’re not specialized in that either.”

“We’re very religious people,” Rexrode said. “Faith protects our butts.”

Wait a minute—did he say demons? I felt my skin crawl. How could a not-particularly-religious girl like me safely lead her own ghost hunt?

Both men agreed that I should pray before I started an investigation. They told me to record everything, to take lots of pictures in mirrors and up stairwells. I should talk to the ghosts, listen a lot, and never go alone. “Visit The Exchange Hotel in Gordonsville,” they said. “Take the tour, and ask for Angel.”

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Arts

Live Arts takes off with Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Motherfucker with the Hat

When Stephen Adly Guirgis wrote The Motherfucker with the Hat, he didn’t overthink the f-bomb. “It just felt like the right title,” he told me in a recent interview. “I also thought the play was going to be performed in my company’s 99-seat theater.”

Not quite.

While Guirgis prepared the show at LABrynth, the West Village theater company where he is a member and co-artistic director, producer Scott Rudin (The Book of Mormon) found a copy of the script. “I didn’t take him seriously,” Guirgis said, “but then he was like ‘Look, I want to do this on Broadway.’”

In 2011, the original cast members from LABrynth were joined by director Anna Shapiro (August: Osage County) and comedian Chris Rock, who auditioned for a supporting role though he’d never performed on Broadway before.

So what happens when a smart, funny script written for a small house goes huge? “We just pretended that we were downtown,” Guirgis said. “It’s like that scene in Hoosiers where he measures the basketball goal. The stage was the same dimensions, you know? It’s the same thing as in the Village, except if people don’t like it everyone is going to know about it.”

Fortunately that wasn’t the case. The show went on to earn six Tony nominations and mixed critical success, though most reviewers seemed to agree with The Wall Street Journal: “Don’t let the stupid title put you off. If you do, you’ll miss one of the best new plays to come to Broadway in ages.”

Live Arts is betting that Charlottesville will love it too. The first show of its 2013-14 season, Motherfucker tells the story of a former drug dealer, Jackie, who leaves prison for a job, a 12-step program, and an apartment with the (coke-addicted) love of his life. When he finds a man’s hat—not his own—in the bedroom, Jackie ricochets between his cousin, his AA sponsor, and the bottom of a bottle on his way to a new normal.

“It’s a viewpoint we don’t often get to explore,” Live Arts’ Artistic Director Julie Hamberg said of the season opener. “It made me laugh out loud when I first read it. Then I found it a deep play about what we’ll do for love, wrapped up in some gritty farce of the here and now. I could not resist.“

When I asked him about community productions of his work, Guirgis’ voice warmed, rounded by his New York accent. “That’s the coolest part of my job,” he said. “If I’m lucky, I write a play at my kitchen table in the middle of the night, and eventually people from all different parts of the country get together and have an experience, that’s hopefully positive, doing a play that I wrote.”

Certainly Guirgis knows how to do his job. In a world of TiVo and Netflix, his works, which include Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and Our Lady of 121st Street (both performed by Live Arts in the early ’00s), are known for bringing non-theater types into the theater. During Motherfucker’s Broadway run he said, “our audience kind of looked like the morning rush hour in the city.”

The script’s appeal includes a tightly wound plot, crackling humor, and characters whose conflicts we recognize. “You know how St. Paul said ‘When I became a man I put away childish things’? My plays tend to be about people who should have put away their childish things, who are trying, and either succeeding or failing to do that.”

What personal references does Guirgis bring to the script? “The heart and soul of the play is Jackie trying to look in the mirror and come to terms with his shit,” Guirgis said. “Can he move on to some next level beyond his perennial childhood? Every day I feel like I’m still living in that.”

Several years ago, experiences with infidelity revealed to Guirgis a truth he’s still trying to express through his art: “That the morality of a child, while flawed, is different than the morality of an adult. When we were kids, we always had each other’s back. We had a code of behavior that revolved around loyalty to a tribe. When we’re older it’s a different story. The tribe isn’t always available or accessible and sometimes we can do fucked up things. I think everybody is trying to find the way to live that feels good to them, that balances being able to take care of themselves and taking care of other people.”

Authentic tension helps Guirgis write in his signature spitfire style. “The thing I love about language of the street is that it’s good for drama,” he said. “You don’t have a lot of time to mince words. People tend to be very direct. You aren’t in a living room. But it can still be very poetic and pleasing, at least to my ear.”

Guirgis does with dialogue what professional ballerinas do with their toes: make years of study, rigor, and near-perfect execution look simple, even easy. Earlier this year, he won a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for drama, and the committee at Yale described him as a writer “whose linguistic bravado reinvigorates the American vernacular.”

And what of that colorful vernacular that some audience members find offensive? “This show is for those who like their theater fast, funny, and hot but do not fear the real,” Hamberg said. “If it were a film it would probably be rated R.” Ike Anderson, who plays Jackie in the Live Arts production, put it simply: “If you can’t handle the title, chances are, you can’t handle this show.”

Guirgis concurred. If audiences of The Motherfucker with the Hat are offended by colorful language, they should consider themselves warned. “The title is my disclaimer,” he told me.

On the phone I nodded and asked, “So what are your feelings on hats?”

“I like hats, but I have a big head,” Guirgis said. “Most hats don’t fit me. Whenever I find a hat that fits me, I usually buy it, but then I don’t wear it.” He paused like a man on the brink of self-awareness. “If I wear a hat that actually fits it looks like a garbage pail. I guess I’m not a hat guy.”

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ARTS Pick: The xx

London trio The xx performs its signature chill-out electro pop on the final leg of a U.S. tour that followed the 2012 launch of its latest album Coexist. Fresh from a festival circuit that included Coachella and Bonnaroo, the band blends gentle rock with metaphysical themes and electronic elements resulting in evocative, intriguing trance ballads and revealing its club music influence.

Friday 9/20. $35, 7pm. nTelos Wireless Pavilion, Downtown Mall. 245-4910.

 

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Hard pressed: Books become art in the VABC member show at Cityspace

A reader’s world is fast and bright these days, an infinite scroll through limitless content. To slake our thirst for information, we swallow so many words we can’t taste them. Even books are designed for disposal: laser-printed for mass consumption and for cheap resale. Once upon a time, however, the written word was a work of art. The Virginia Arts of the Book Center (VABC) Member Showcase, now on display at Cityspace, is a quiet ode to the days when words carried literal and figurative weight, when their impressions on durable paper were assembled by careful hands.

The VABC is an open studio, supported by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, where artists practice making books, prints, and other fine art pieces. Print selections from the VABC’s Member Showcase include artwork, handmade books, and broadsides. Aside from a few digital photographs of printing presses and their components, the exhibit’s works were made using craftsmen’s tools and techniques: polyester and Sintraplate etchings, woodcuts and engravings. These methods transfer images by inking carved surfaces, then pressing a relief of the image onto paper or canvas. All are forms of letterpress, the umbrella term for printing practices invented by Johannes Gutenberg, which also includes the printing of text.

Finely textured words, assembled from moveable type on a press, inked and imprinted heavily onto paper, flow throughout the exhibit in the form of poems, citations, and announcements. On posters, like those for the VABC “Raucous Auction” fundraiser and other events, letters are large and fonts varied, combining newsboy excitement with a modern sense of humor. My favorite poster features a “shucking smackdown” and a pressed illustration of two women threatening each other with oyster shucking knives. Each color on these prints required a round of pressing, and even though a piece with blue and black and gray and pink and purple likely took hours, I sense the artists had fun.

The same is true for miniature and full-sized books propped up on pedestals throughout the exhibit. Book nerds, rejoice, for here you will find bindings and styles you’ve likely never seen: piano hinged books with spines like bound knitting needles; flag books with pages in long thick strips like keys on a musical instrument. Carousel books combine cutouts and folded pages and look like tiny theaters in the round.

On display too are mixed media collages layered with photopolymers, tiny blades of paper arranged among book spines and occasional type strikes. Key texts and titles have been plucked from old books lost to anonymity or worse, and they gain new life reconstituted as visual art form.

Counter-intuitively, works that most resemble pages tend to have the fewest number of words. Granted, visitors cannot leaf through the few bound books on display, so the majority of type is likely hidden from view. But the art, the beauty, of all these objects relies on their literary economy.

The majority of the exhibit is dedicated to broadsides, single pieces of paper printed with a single poem or sparse paragraph. Unchallenged by numerous visuals or layers of color, the simple texture of these letters on paper—seen most often on wedding invitations—focus the mind on the effort that each word requires, the precision and hours behind every line. This form of art is the most accurate I’ve found to express writing as a labor of love. It reminds viewers how long it takes to create beautiful sentences or verse. It manifests the exhaustion inherent to honest self-expression.

As I read through broadsides, I think of the poets, and the years they’ve dedicated to their craft. I think of the work it will take me just to describe what I’ve seen. I linger even though I shouldn’t, like most people, I have obligations elsewhere.

Someone made a letterpress of Charles Wright’s Cowboy Up. “I’d like to see the river of stars / fall noiselessly through the nine heavens for once, / But the world’s weight, and the world’s welter, speak big talk and big confusion.”

In these letters I catch a glimpse of the way the world used to be. For just a second, before I leave, I imagine a cascade of stars.

The VABC Member Show will be on display at CitySpace through September 27.  www.virginiabookarts.org

 

 

 

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Virginia Folklife apprenticeships promote the arts of everyday life

In a world of exploding tuitions, shaky job markets, and ubiquitous unpaid internships, the notion of an apprenticeship sounds like an antiquated luxury. In the Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Program, however, the system of master and apprentice is alive and well, not only offering hands-on education but the cultivation of inter-generational connections and preservation of Virginia heritage.

According to the Virginia Folklife Program (VFP), folklife refers to the “arts of everyday life.” In Virginia, this includes traditions like letterpress printing and blacksmithing and dulcimer making, beekeepping and quilting and clawhammer banjo and moonshine storytelling.

If folklife is the local, contemporary craftsman whose habits are guided by the wisdom of past generations, the Folklife Apprenticeship Program is his connection to the future. Every year, approximately twelve master artists are paired with qualified apprentices for a one-on-one, nine-month learning experience in which master and apprentice share past experiences, visions for the future, and traditional practices in their cultural contexts.

Many master-apprentice pairs also share bloodlines. Consider Wayne Henderson, master guitar maker and winner of the National Heritage Fellowship, who now teaches his daughter Jayne to keep the family practice alive. Jessica Canaday Stewart teaches her cousin, Vanessa Adkins, the traditional powwow dances of the Chickahominy tribe (the second largest in Virginia).

Those pairs who don’t share a family tree often reference on the teachings of parents and grandparents, Dudley Biddlecomb, the master oyster farmer, who shows apprentice Peter Hedlund how to identify harvest spots on the shoreline by landmarks familiar to his father and father’s father.  Apprentices are chosen, the VFP said, for their dedication to an art form and their desire to execute in the style of their forebears, to learn “those elusive qualities of the craft that have invested it with such cultural resonance and traditional resilience.”

Staunton-based photographer Pat Jarrett, whose work has been published by The Washington PostThe New York Times, and NPR, spent three years following participants in the Folklife Apprenticeship Program. His shots capture the labor of tradition—a stained apron, a furrowed palm—as well as the intersection of generations—master and apprentice strumming banjos side-by-side, two men examining the same unshod hoof. Education in action, yes, but also so much more. 

The VFP will present its tenth annual Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase, featuring blues, bluegrass, and gospel performances as well as handmade guitars, oyster shucking, and other culinary crafts, on Sunday, September 15 at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. An exhibit of Pat Jarrett’s photography will be on display at The Bridge PAI through September 26.

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Arts

ARTS Pick: Carnival of Wonders

Fill up on sword swallowing, fire eating, and other illusions at the Carnival of Wonders, an evening of fantastic performances led by career magicians Peter Monticup and Steve Pittella, assisted by Miss Electra and The Rubber Girl. Their big city stunts and sleights of hand will kick off PVCC’s 15th season of fine and performing arts. Curious fans can put the performance in context with The History of Sideshow, a public lecture earlier in the day that features vintage video, props, and other curios from the American carnival culture.

Saturday 9/14. $10-12, 7:30pm. Lecture at 1:30pm. Main Stage Theater, PVCC, 501 College Dr. 961-5376.

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Graphic novelist Laura Lee Gulledge found inspiration in Charlottesville

When you ask Brooklyn-based artist and graphic novelist Laura Lee Gulledge about Charlottesville, her upbeat voice turns nostalgic. “Places like the IX building were full of my people. People who cared more about what you did than where you went to art school. People who helped me make art.”

Creative community is the crux of Gulledge’s sophomore work, a young adult graphic novel set in Charlottesville. In Will & Whit, which Gulledge wrote and illustrated, a teenage girl must face her fear of the dark —and a family tragedy—when a hurricane knocks out power and threatens to ruin the carnival her friends have been building.

Gulledge, who lived in Charlottesville from 2002-07, based her fictional storm on Hurricane Isabelle, and the novel references several institutions that locals will recognize. The longtime artist and teacher chose details, like a flier for Moto Saloon, consciously. “In Will & Whit, I wanted to model a creative community for young people,” said Gulledge. She drew the grassroots Charlottesville that helped shape her own artistic path as “my little love letter to the creative scene.”

In her debut graphic novel Page by Paige, Gulledge explored the way creativity helps students understand themselves. Nominated for both the Eisner and Harvey awards and one of YALSA’s Top Ten Books for Teens in 2012, Page by Paige reflects Gulledge’s own experience as a teen.

“When I was younger, I could draw out my stuff even if I couldn’t say it. I could use pictures, not words,” she explained. “Now we work out our issues on paper so we can share them with other people.”

Gulledge describes herself as an instrumentalist artist, someone who makes art to convey an idea or teach a concept. “Education and art are the same thing,” she said. “I approach new stories, like the picture book I’m currently working on, as ‘what do I want to teach these little kids?’ Their brains are like sponges.”

Long before she wrote her first graphic novel, Gulledge earned her master’s in art education from James Madison University. She moved to Charlottesville to teach, working in the Louisa County school system for a few years. But the public school “felt really wrong,” Gulledge said. “We need creative people, but the outlets to teaching creativity [in schools] are getting squished and squashed.”

Once you acknowledge the complexities of the creative process, Gulledge said, standardized education looks one-size-fits-all, and you see “a disconnect between how we learn and how we teach.”

Conflicted by her chosen career, she left the school and took a job in the furniture store The Artful Lodger. Flexible hours allowed Gulledge to start making art for herself. “You can’t teach someone else to be an artist if you aren’t an artist,” she said, “so I started experimenting. I lived in this renovated motel room near the railroad tracks, and I painted murals. My first art show ever was held at Fellini’s, and I was, what, 26?”

It was a happy time, and Gulledge immersed herself in Charlottesville’s collaborative art-making scene. But as local venues like Traxx, Starr Hill (music hall), and the IX building disappeared, Gulledge and her friends began to look elsewhere. “People told me I should go to New York to make connections and discover my niche,” she said. “Even my boss—she liked working with me and knew I was good at my job, but she told me ‘this is my dream, not yours. You should figure out your dream instead of playing it safe.’”

In 2006, C-VILLE Weekly’s readers voted Laura Lee Gulledge Best Artist. A few months later, she packed her bags and “took 2007 as my science experiment year.” She spent a few months with the Junior Art Club in Ghana, West Africa, as a volunteer art teacher in elementary after school programs, and then she moved to New York.

“As an artist you need help—a docent, a cheap living situation, a spokesperson, something—you just can’t do it on your own,” Gulledge said, and when the redhead became an au pair, she discovered it to be true. “The children’s mother was one of Leonard Bernstein’s daughters, and we were on the same wavelength about so many things. That young people need to express themselves, that creativity belongs in education.”

Her new mentor gave her a gift that would change her life: her first graphic novel. “For years, I’d only worked in sketchbooks,” Gulledge said. “I had spent years trying to figure out where my oh-so-personal-metaphorical drawings fit in, from self-publishing zines to gallery shows,” and graphic novels were the piece of the puzzle she didn’t know she’d been missing. Like the heroine of Will & Whit, Gulledge discovered that “once I stopped trying to control my life, everything got easier. Like trying to swim upstream versus just floating.”

Not that life as a working artist is easy. She’s worked as a scenic artist for department store Christmas windows, an interactive event producer, and a body painter for burlesque dancers. She also does publicity tours for her novels. “It’s a long game, the comic industry. You have to keep plugging away and going to shows and conventions,” she said. “But it’s also much more soul-satisfying.”

These days Gulledge practices education-
in-process through therapeutic illustration and collaborative art projects. “When people use their hands, they just open up. We need to use our hands. It unplugs all this other stuff.”

In her work, Gulledge reminds us that art is not self-indulgent, not trite. “As kids, we all naturally make stuff. Until age 7 we sing and tell stories. It’s how we’re wired, it makes us happy. In fourth grade we put ourselves in a context and start censoring ourselves, but you’re the only person who is qualified to write that book. It’s one little volume in one small corner of the huge library of human experience, but only you can do it.”