Tag: David Vaughn Straughn

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Culture

Power of perspective

David Vaughn Straughn. Photo: Eze Amos.

By Julia Stumbaugh

On August 23, 2020 a Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer shot a 29-year-old Black man named Jacob Blake in the back. In the days that followed, Charlottesville actor and director David Vaughn Straughn sat down to write a play.

“I felt this anger and intolerance and frustration,” says Straughn. “I knew that was inside of me, and I wanted to find a healthy and constructive outlet to get all of that out.”

The shooting came to the attention of Straughn—and the entire nation—because one of Blake’s neighbors filmed the incident on her phone. Earlier that summer, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier captured the world’s attention when she filmed the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Straughn’s new play turns the camera onto those videographers, exploring the life of the fictional Tanesha, a teenage girl whose life is upended after she witnesses and records the murder of an unarmed Black man.

“[Frazier] stood there for 10 minutes and had the courage to watch a man die and not walk away, and admit to her affected mental health after this incident,” says Straughn. “The backlash, and the angst, and the hate that she’s received for bringing this to the forefront just speaks to how we treat Black women when they do the right thing.”

Straughn’s new play, entitled Tanesha after its central character, explores how the girl and her family grapple with the fallout of her filming. Straughn says the inspiration he felt was so intense that the script took him just four days to finish. When he showed the finished work to his friend Leslie M. Scott-Jones, artistic director of the Charlottesville Players Guild, the only question she had was how soon she could get it on the stage.

“I think this is a conversation that Charlottesville has been having for the past four years now on a grand scale,” says Scott-Jones. “But I also believe that this is a conversation that has been going on in some form or fashion in every Black household in Charlottesville since the beginning.”

Straughn has worked as an actor and writer across Virginia and along the East Coast, including in two off-Broadway plays. He considers the CPG, where he was able to influence everything from the script to the lighting to the set design as he directed and starred in his first original production, to be something special.

“Good theater is hard to find, and when you do, you stick with the theater house that has the intention of challenging the thought of the community while compensating their actors,” he says. “We are not just volunteer community artists doing a really fun project.  We are artists. We are committed to this production.”

The cast of Tanesha rehearses ahead of the show’s debut on August 19. Photo: Eze Amos.

In recent years, the CPG has been the nucleus of Charlottesville’s Black theater community, regularly performing at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. This iteration of the Guild opened its first play, August Wilson’s Fences, in April 2017.

“When someone says ‘theater,’ automatically people think ‘white theater,’” Scott-Jones says. “This is why we have to quantify this is Black theater, from a Black perspective.”

Three years later, as pandemic-related shutdowns rippled across Virginia, it became clear that even well-established Broadway scripts wouldn’t be enough to guarantee a profitable season for the group. While other local theaters were forced to cut back their lineups, Scott-Jones decided to turn financial void into creative opportunity, with one of CPG’s busiest seasons ever. The 2021 lineup provided a metaphorical megaphone for the Black voices of Charlottesville by showcasing original productions.

“It’s really hard for a Black playwright, especially in this area, to have their work produced, to have it put on its feet in front of an audience and get feedback,” says Scott-Jones. “Because we’re in a small market, community theaters can’t really make the choice to produce a whole lot of independent work, because they have to keep the lights on. So this was the perfect opportunity to be able to showcase these writers and their work.”

The 2021 season, called Amplify, began in March with shows written and produced by local playwrights. These have included Scott-Jones’ Thirty-Seven, in which an eighth-grader considers what it means to become an activist; Ti Ames’ See About the Girls, a companion to Amiri Baraka’s 1964 The Slave, which focuses on bi-racial sisters contemplating their identities; and Teresa Dowell-Vest’s Vinegar Hill, a bittersweet reflection on Charlottesville’s now-torn-down Black neighborhood. In November, the series will conclude with Aiyana Marcus’ She Echoes on the Vine, an examination of a women exploring her identity through memories of her ancestors.

Veering among heart-breaking, uplifting, and rage-inducing, these productions have captured the attention of people across Charlottesville by grappling with poignant issues of race from a Black perspective.

“What I want people to take away from [Tanesha] is that police brutality, and the pervasive violence towards people of color, is not only harmful to people of color,” says Straughn. “It’s harmful to everyone in America.”

Scott-Jones hopes to continue including at least one original title from a Charlottesville writer in each of CPG’s upcoming seasons, in addition to providing other opportunities for local Black creatives. The CPG is partnering with the Hamner Theater and Four County Players, two organizations Scott-Jones describes as working to produce actively anti-racist theater, for a September production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing that will help recoup some of the theaters’ recent financial losses.

This multi-theater production marks CPG’s substantial growth since 2017. Its plays resonated with a community still wrestling with the violence that shook Charlottesville that August. Tanesha, which will run from August 19 to 22, will premiere to both a limited crowd of season-ticket holders and also a wider audience via general admission livestream.

“This is not just a play about Black men dying,” says Straughn. “It’s a play about people dying, and people dying unjustly.”

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Arts

Mourning the losses: CPG processes grief and transformation in a recut of Hamlet

Leslie Scott-Jones, Ray Smith, and David Vaughn Straughn star in Hambone, the Charlottesville Players Guild’s Afro-futurist adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Photo by Cara Walton

Let’s pretend for a minute. It’s sometime in the not-too-distant future. Charlottesville is a thriving black kingdom, free of the white gaze and white corruption, and comprised of various hamlets, including Vinegar Hill, Starr Hill, and between them, Gospel Hill, the kingdom’s seat and center of spirituality.

Such is the premise of Hambone, an original, Afro-futurist telling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet by local all-black theater troupe the Charlottesville Players Guild.

You know how Hamlet goes: King Hamlet has died. His son, Prince Hamlet, returns home to mourn, only to find that Queen Gertrude has taken up with the dead king’s brother, Claudius. The king’s ghost visits Hamlet with a message: Claudius killed him, and young Hamlet must avenge his death. In the process, young Hamlet goes mad (or does he?).

And while the play is technically fiction, much of what Hambone delves into in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium is real.

The Charlottesville Players Guild’s desire to rework Hamlet came about during the troupe’s summer 2018 Macbeth adaptation, Black Mac. The cast became particularly interested in familial relationships among those characters, and Hamlet came up as another play rife with family drama.

The troupe decided to make Hamlet into “the ultimate black family drama,” one that showcases “the spectrum of black family,” says Leslie Scott-Jones, CPG’s creative director who adapted the script and also plays Queen Gertrude. Director Shelby Marie Edwards chose to focus the production on grief, specifically “the way grief is looked at from the African continuum.”

“One of the ways we incorporate an African aesthetic is how the characters deal with death, how we frame death within the show,” says Edwards. “I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s not like they die and that’s it,” she says, because in the African diaspora, one’s ancestors are always present. It’s not life and death, Edwards explains, but rather “life, death, and transformation.” Take King Hamlet’s ghost—whose message for his son drives much of the plot­—as just one example.

When Hamlet/Hambone (played by David Vaughn Straughn) so famously asks in his soliloquy, “To be, or not to be?,” he contemplates life and death. But in Hambone, it’s less a question of physicality and more one of spirituality: Will he accept grief as a part of life and continue on, not just breathing but actually living? Or will he allow grief to consume his soul and render him essentially lifeless?

What’s in a name?

Why call this adaptation Hambone? Some folks might know “hambone” as an African American style of dance that involves slapping one’s own body to create a rhythm (it’s also called the Juba dance, or, originally, the Pattin’ Juba). But it was also used as a derogatory term for black performers. “So, that’s the perfect name for this [production], because [Hamlet] performs madness for certain people to elicit a response,” says Leslie Scott-Jones, who adapted the script. “It’s also a commentary on code-switching.”

Many of the CPG’s creative choices for Hambone add new and interesting layers. They meld African American vernacular English with Shakespeare’s early modern English. Ivan Orr has composed an original soundtrack —which he describes as hip-hop as it might sound in the future —that helps establish the mood and propel the story forward.

Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend, typically staged as a man, is a woman, and Hamlet is in love with her, despite the fact that he’s betrothed to Ophelia. His friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are also women. That could explain Hamlet/Hambone’s intuition, and why he can communicate with his father’s spirit, says Scott-Jones. And what does all that say about Hamlet/Hambone’s relationship with his mother, Gertrude?

King Hamlet and Claudius are twins (both played by Ray Smith)—which raises new questions (and probably a few eyebrows) about Gertrude’s hasty marriage to Claudius, itself complicated by the fact that in this production, Gertrude is pregnant. And that raises all sorts of questions about heirs and future kings.

David Vaughn Straughn plays the title role in Hambone. Photo by Cara Walton

The CPG has also added a griot, “an African storyteller who holds wisdom,” explains Edwards, a role played by Brenda Brown-Grooms, a local pastor renowned for her sermons. Brown-Grooms grew up in Charlottesville, and her family attended one of the black churches located on Gospel Hill.

This is yet another way in which the substance of Hambone is quite real, particularly for Charlottesville’s African American communities. Gospel Hill and Vinegar Hill are physically gone from present-day Charlottesville, majority black neighborhoods razed by the city in the mid-20th century in the name of “urban renewal.” And Starr Hill, another such neighborhood, is starting to disappear, too, thanks to gentrification (and, it can be said, the whiteness that the Charlottesville imagined in Hambone has managed to escape).

While these neighborhoods are physically gone, their presence remains—in people, stories, photographs, in Hambone, and in grief. Black Charlottesvillians still mourn these losses. These neighborhoods lived, they died, and now they are transformed.

“I want to have a real, cathartic moment on stage,” says Edwards, one that can work in service of transformation for actors and audience alike. “I always want the audience to leave a little bit more healed than when they began,” she says. “I want the audience to un-learn any conceptions, consciously or unconsciously, they might have about what people in black bodies can do.”

See Hambone, the Charlottesville Players Guild’s Afro-futurist adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center August 22 through September 1.

Categories
Arts

Jitney is fueled by authenticity and emotion

“Black theater is raw and painful at times,” says Eric Jones, who plays Booster in August Wilson’s Jitney at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center September 15-24. Photo by Eze Amos

Lights go up on the wood-paneled stage in the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium to reveal the inside of a jitney cab station in Pittsburgh. It’s early fall 1977 and the Hill District, a group of neighborhoods that have long been the cultural center of black life in the city—full of black-owned homes, businesses, jazz clubs and more—has for two decades been boarded up, block by block, in the name of urban renewal.

Nine characters sit in tableau on the stage, bathed in dramatic light, and the audience is afforded a momentary look at their expressions, their presence, before the play—August Wilson’s Jitney—begins.

There’s Darnell, known to his fellow cab drivers as Youngblood, a Vietnam War veteran working a couple of jobs to build a better future for his girlfriend, Rena, and their son. There’s Philmore, a hotel doorman and frequent jitney passenger; hotheaded busybody driver Turnbo; Shealy, a numbers taker who uses the station as a base; Booster, back home after 20 years in the state penitentiary; Fielding, a jitney driver and former tailor to the stars; Rena, Youngblood’s girlfriend and mother to 2-year-old Jesse. There’s Doub, a Korean War veteran and longtime driver who’s felt invisible to white folks, and, seated behind a desk, Becker, station manager, father to Booster and father figure to many others.

David Vaughn Straughn plays Youngblood, a Vietnam War veteran who’s trying to build a better life for his family. Photo by Eze Amos

Nine black characters—played by nine black actors—in a play written by a black playwright. It’s a rare occurrence in Charlottesville theater, but one that the city will see consistently over the next few years, as a group of local actors and directors stage all 10 plays in Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, a decade-by-decade look at the African-American experience in the 20th century. Jitney is the second play they’ve staged; the first, Fences, directed by Clinton Johnston, had a spring 2017 run.

“Doing community theater in Charlottesville as an artist of color is always challenging,” says Leslie Scott-Jones, Jitney director and one of the cycle’s producers. When Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School, came to Scott-Jones with the idea to stage the entire Pittsburgh Cycle, Scott-Jones agreed immediately because of what it would mean for actors and directors of color.

“No one does black theater” in Charlottesville, says Scott-Jones—black theater being plays with black characters written by black playwrights for black actors. Scott-Jones says that a lot of local talent goes ignored and unmined because there aren’t many roles for actors of color. There’s been the occasional production (Live Arts did Wilson’s Seven Guitars during its 1998-1999 season), but stories by and about people of color aren’t told as often as they could—and should—be told.

“It’s important that black stories are told by those who live it rather than those who experience it third party,” says Ike Anderson, a local actor, musician and choreographer who plays Turnbo. “For the most part, any time I play a person of color on stage, it is written by someone who isn’t a person of color and thus [writes] about a character based on how they perceive blackness. I don’t have to worry about that with August Wilson.”

While there are themes and instances in the play that are particular to the minority experience—racism and gentrification, for example—the Pittsburgh Cycle plays can also clue an audience in to the fact that the black experience is not necessarily “other,” says Scott-Jones. Jitney is a rather universal story, one of navigating an uncertain future while reckoning with a painful and complicated past, viewed through the lens of black life in 1977 Pittsburgh.

“Theater, and art in general, has the ability to touch people in ways that a conversation, or going and listening to a TED Talk, just can’t do,” says Scott-Jones.

Theater can make you feel deeply, says David Vaughn Straughn, who plays Youngblood. For him, acting is more than embodying someone else on stage. “It’s empathizing with an individual and putting yourself in their shoes and being able to convey that empathy out on stage and making the audience feel it. The more I believe it, the more you believe it,” he says.

It’s been a hard summer in Charlottesville; between three white supremacist rallies, one of which brought violence and death, and questions of how to begin dealing with systemic racism, among other things, in hopes for a future of equality, there’s a lot for us to think about. And the safe, but not always comfortable, space of the theater offers a place for some of that intellectual and emotional work to be done.

“What we’re doing, especially in light of what our town is going through, and has been going through, is immensely important because it’s the humanization of people of color,” says Scott-Jones. “And there is nothing that’s more important than that in this moment.”