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Arts Culture

Live Arts stages compelling he-said, she-said plays

Live Arts kicks off its season with two thought-provoking shows, "What the Constitution Means to Me" and "An Iliad," in repertory through October 28. Details at livearts.org. Supplied photo.

We humans are social animals, which is one reason why theater endures as a way for people to share space and feel something together. In a time when our nation feels quite divided (ahem: understatement), any opportunity to learn from history and engage with challenging subjects in thought-provoking ways is a good opportunity. The current Live Arts shows have us covered on that front with back-to-back chances to dig in to the depth of the human experience from two distinct yet resonant perspectives.

As Live Arts’ 2024/2025 Voyages season picks up steam, What the Constitution Means to Me and An Iliad share the Founders Theater and alternate performances. The choice of presenting the plays in repertory makes sense, because they are very much in conversation. Both shows feature powerful performances enhanced by the black box theater’s intimate staging conditions. Audience members feel essential to the storytelling.

In What the Constitution Means to Me, we find ourselves in an American Legion hall represented by a minimalist patriotic set. Enter Heidi, a character based on playwright/original lead Heidi Schreck, who takes us to a scholarship speech contest about the U.S. Constitution that she competed in as a teen. Heidi, portrayed by Tovah Close the night I attended, invites the audience to play the cigar-smoking men who filled the American Legion halls of her youth. We were a predominantly female audience, and the first thing many did when invited to embody men was to take up more space, which resonates with the play’s central theme.  

Through Heidi’s personal stories, and those of her grandmothers and mother, we come to understand how preposterous it is for Heidi to be speechifying about the personal relevance of a document that first explicitly mentions women in the 19th amendment, passed in 1919, that granted women the right to vote. As a woman, I found the play to be validating and emotionally challenging. Heidi’s statistics about rape and domestic partner violence against women landed pointedly. Just as the weight of the traumas became overwhelming, there was an intermission. Let me tell you: We hit the bar hard.

Fortunately, the play’s second act offers a respite from heartstring plucking (mostly) by featuring a debate between Heidi and an actual debater (Aafreen Aamir). The topic is whether we should keep or abolish the U.S. Constitution. Honestly, it never occurred to me that we could abolish our Constitution and institute a new one—one that protects the rights of Native Americans, people of color, queer folks, women, and other minorities with the same vehemence as in protecting the rights of white men like our founding fathers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a proud American, which is probably why the idea of abolishing the Constitution never occurred to me. I’m also a disheartened American, an American who sees that some things need to change as our country continues to evolve, just as the founding fathers envisioned it would.

The following night, I saw An Iliad, which blends sections of Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s epic poem with moments of modern contextualization. Two nameless, timeless poets—an elder and a younger—arrive and investigate the sparse set. For several minutes, the audience watches as the elder, portrayed by David Minton (also the director), and the younger by Jesse Timmons, set the stage before beginning the tale. I love that live theater has the power to get me to care about watching a man adjust the placement of a milk crate—and I did care!

The Iliad is a familiar tale to many, with ancient heroes Achilles and Hector leading armies during the Trojan War. The added context breathes life into this show. The Younger Poet likens (spoilers) ill-fated Patroclus’ bloodlust in battle to our modern experience of road rage. He begins by expressing a degree of anger relatable to anyone who’s been cut off in traffic. However, Timmons then takes his performance to an extreme that fills the room with discomfort, graphically describing physical violence, inappropriate as a reaction for a roadway mishap. The Elder Poet touches the younger, to snap him out of his fiery passion, and the younger apologizes, saying something like, “That’s not me. It’s not me.” Reckless uncontrollable rage does not define the man, or at least The Younger Poet doesn’t want it to. One of the play’s most affecting aspects is the tension created by the tenderness between the two characters juxtaposed against the horrors of the Trojan War and all the wars after, including those that are raging even now.  

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Arts Culture

Contemporary musician Dan Tepfer converses with the past, present, and future

Contemporary musician Dan Tepfer follows unexpected paths through jazz and classical work. He performs on September 8 and 9 at The Paramount Theater during the 25th Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival. Supplied photo.

By Ella Powell

Pianist/composer Dan Tepfer says his earliest memories on the keys are of improvising as a toddler. “It seemed like a very natural thing for me to do, to just make up music,” he says. “My classical piano teachers would say, ‘don’t do that,’ but I knew it was okay because granddad did.” 

During the early days, when Tepfer was creating his own alternate versions of “Jingle Bells,” his jazz pianist grandfather served as a musical inspiration. Now, Tepfer collaborates with icons of the form like Lee Konitz, and composes for musicians such as the highly accomplished French-American vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvantl.

An artistic force, Tepfer goes beyond jazz, creating compositions for symphony orchestras and performing with them on occasion. “One of my favorite performances was recently, at the end of June,” he says. “I did two concerts in the U.K. where I performed the Ravel Piano Concerto in G with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. As a jazz pianist, that was a big growing experience for me.”

When Tepfer makes his first of two appearances at The Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival on September 8 at The Paramount Theater, he will take the stage with his multimedia improvisational composition Natural Machines, released in 2019 as a video album. 

In Natural Machines, Tepfer’s acoustic Disklavier piano plays all on its own in a phantasmic experience. The magical sounds and visuals accompanying the album are a direct response to the pianist’s computer programming and his live freestyle on the keys. In the song “Tremolo,” for example, Tepfer’s chosen algorithm allows otherwise impossible musical techniques to be accomplished in real time.

He describes music as “the intersection of the algorithmic and the spiritual,” which speaks to his obsession with achieving harmony between concrete rules and whimsical expression. His discography of 12 studio albums is deeply explorative and honest, and connects to the senses. After 29 years of playing, the pianist continues to defy conventions and bend genres in solo projects like his 2011 performance and improvisation of Bach’s masterpiece, Goldberg Variations/Variations that won him international acclaim. 

On September 9, also at the Paramount, Tepfer performs Inventions/Reinventions, another improvisation on Bach. He goes into it without any premeditated melodies, just a creative process to develop ideas. “It kind of feels like I’m both a child who just has crazy ideas and can run around freely, and the parent who’s supervising the child and who is going to keep the child from falling off the cliff,” says Tepfer. The piece converses with Bach in a way that brings the prodigy back to life as Tepfer fills in the nine “missing” keys not included in Bach’s 15 original inventions. 

Always looking to connect with audiences, he hopes a project that revitalizes a 300-year-old composition will build an affinity for his style of music. With each improvisation, he shares a meaningful story just as Bach intended to do through his own compositions. “Bach’s music is a magnet for me that never seems to lose its allure, which isn’t uncommon for jazz musicians,” says Tepfer. “There’s a lot of kinship between the musical approach we take in jazz and how Bach was thinking about music.”

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Arts Culture

Playing their part

Garcia Peoples will play Charlottesville as a five-piece band that includes guitarist Tom Malach (foreground).The ensemble has relied on a flexibility that informs not just its open-ended compositions, but also the availability of its members. Photo: Mayuko Fujino.

By Dave Cantor

Early in Garcia Peoples’ run, there was a four-year break between albums. It’s an almost unthinkable span of time in the digital age, but it was spent devising material for a clutch of future albums that includes five studio efforts and several live recordings.

It’s an avalanche of music, one that revels in song-focused pieces, as well as extended improvisational flourishes, positioning the New York band at a surprising crossroad, one where a punky DIY ethos runs into a jammy musical premise.

The group’s latest album, Dodging Dues (No Quarter Records), was recorded and released just ahead of the pandemic’s descent, disallowing the ensemble from plying its trade on concert stages. And after all that time away from performance, Garcia Peoples had to refamiliarize itself with the music and establish new meaning for it within the context of the world we’re now inhabiting.

“You think you know something,” guitarist Tom Malach says over the phone from his home in Queens after a gig in Philadelphia. “Even just playing today, new ideas happen with the songs after not playing them for a bit. We’re the kind of band to still be reworking songs from our first album when we’re playing live.”

Those live settings have provided a chance for a batch of hobbyists, armed with recording gear, to capture the troupe in the wild. On archive.org, more than 30 live sets by the group sit alongside thousands of Grateful Dead recordings and audio rescued from decaying 78 RPM slabs and cylinder recordings.

“The fact that someone would want to come out to the show and document it for others, that’s an awesome thing for us,” Malach says. “We put in a good amount of work to make sure different things are happening every night and each performance is unique.”

The ensemble’s undergone some personnel shifts, with members moving to Chicago and back to New York a few times, and then spreading out across the region. They’ve performed as everything from a trio to a sextet; on Friday at The Southern, they’ll appear as a quintet.

Dodging Dues reflects a copacetic contingent of players, and perhaps includes a summation of the band, sonically and philosophically. On “Tough Freaks,” where “maggots turn to flies” and gardens are properly tended, the band’s looking for “an escape from everyday drudgery, dodging the dues that life wants you to pay at any given moment,” Malach writes via email. The tune comes at an ambling gait, weaving guitar lines with colorful keys and a momentous chorus, where common folly is critiqued and a desire to embrace dreams emerges in full blossom.

A few tracks in, spacey, electrified folk underscores the breezy progression of “Cassandra,” where it seems as if the figure from Greek mythology is being asked for help. And album-closer “Fill Your Cup” has a spiritual connection to Antipodean punks The Saints—both in its riffy guitar and growling vocals.

Despite forays into aggressive sounds, an earlier tour saw Garcia Peoples opening for Grateful Shred, a Dead cover band. “That tour was awesome,” says the guitarist. “They’re really good dudes and they’re fantastic musicians, and they interpret the music really well. …I was having a blast. Number one, you get to go out and do your thing, and then you get to relax after being the opener and listen to some good jams.” 

It was a turn that belied the group’s earliest days, which found them playing basement shows in and around New Jersey, where Malach grew up.

“We’re closer to that than the jam world,” he says, while acknowledging the impact of the Dead’s blueprint—how they went about the business of being a band, and how members approached and thought about music.

That Malach’s father Bob, who appears on Garcia Peoples’ expansive 2019 One Step Behind, was a professional musician likely informed his conception of music and writing for an ensemble.

Beginning in the mid-’70s, reedist Bob performed with folks like Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes, The Stylistics, The O’Jays, and Stanley Clarke. The younger Malach says his childhood home wasn’t a place where musicians came to hang out, but his father forged close relationships with a wide swath of the folks he played with. Malach called late jazz drummer Alphonse Mouzon, “Uncle Alphonse.”

“I think I found a healthy medium,” Malach says about watching the travails of a professional musician, then turning toward performance himself. “My dad was always like, ‘Don’t do the music thing. Play music and learn music, because it’s good and fun, and good for the world. But it’s tough to be a musician.’”

That heady lesson imparted by Malach’s father might not actually have set in, though: After getting off the phone, the guitarist and his cohort were set to woodshed new ideas in preparation for more time on the road and in the studio.