Love and deception: Romance, comedy, and deceit come to the stage in the form of one of William Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies, Twelfth Night. Directed by Jamie Virostko and featuring a talented ensemble, this intimate spin on the Bard’s twisted love triangle combines gender-fluidity with romantic chaos in a traditional yet pared-down production.
For a university with such a dominant sports culture, it’s easy to forget that the arts community is thriving, too. UVA boasts over 100 visual and performing arts organizations, from aerial dance clubs to filmmakers’ societies.
The vast majority of these groups are Contracted Independent Organizations. This lack of a direct university connection can spell difficulty when finding spaces on Grounds to rehearse or congregate. Between the infamous “concrete box” of the Student Activities Building and the still hypothetical arts building to fill the lot where the Cavalier Inn once stood, it can sometimes feel as though the necessary space for university creatives doesn’t exist.
That’s where the community steps in. Many Charlottesville arts organizations make an effort to welcome UVA students.
Just ask Julia Kudravetz, owner of New Dominion Bookshop. Since taking over operations in November 2017, Kudravetz has set her sights on ensuring that the bookstore’s capacity for hosting community events is preserved, and even amplified. Selling books is only part of her mission statement, she says. Just as important is for members of the community, “a nice mix of humans,” to attend New Dominion’s events and engage with each other.
Aside from the Thursday night MFA readings, New Dominion hosts student-focused open mics. Kudravetz is branching out to more performative groups as well—one of the most recent events at the bookstore was a staged reading of Much Ado About Nothing, co-hosted by UVA drama group Shakespeare on the Lawn. She’s also expressed interest in a cappella groups performing in the store, and says she’s waiting for a student to pitch her “an avant-garde puppet show.”
Rather than see a divide between the university and the rest of the city, a tendency both students and locals can fall prey to, Kudravetz considers the two communities inextricably linked. “The fate of the town is tied to the fate of UVA, and we need to be more aware of each other’s communities,” she says.
Kudravetz also admires “the energy that college students bring to projects”—in fact, her staff is partially composed of current UVA students and recent grads. New Dominion’s assistant manager, Sarah Valencia, graduated from the creative prose writing program last May.
Valencia has an intimate understanding of why UVA creatives might not see eye-to-eye with their Charlottesville counterparts. “There’s definitely a divide,” she acknowledges, “but we’re working on that.”
Valencia is less concerned with whether students know about New Dominion and more so with whether they feel like they belong. “I wish more students would come out,” she says, describing some of the readings she went to while attending the university in the comparatively “dreary” UVA Bookstore. “We just have to make sure…they feel welcome.”
Gorilla Theater Productions is less centralized than New Dominion, but just as committed to student involvement. Artistic Director Anna Lien describes it as a “counterculture, offbeat organization…just now kinda getting in the limelight.”
Located in a tiny black building tucked into Allied Street, Gorilla Theater is easy to overlook but impossible to forget. The organization’s programming tends towards the violent, absurd, or otherwise controversial—but its intent is not to shock, Lien explains. Rather, Gorilla wants to foster conversation.
“We have a big focus on LGBTQ issues and transition,” she says, explaining her plans to partner with a transition support group at the university in order to bring visibility to these students in creative fashion. Gorilla Theater’s current student- based project is its annual Summer Shorts, which consist of short plays typically directed by and starring high school or university students. “It’s young people being able to rise to an occasion that they wouldn’t otherwise have.”
Lien also acknowledges that a barrier exists between UVA arts and the Charlottesville equivalent, but she doesn’t think it’s a mental one. “The biggest challenge we have is transportation,” she says. “That’s something that I’m working towards figuring out. How can I bring theater to UVA? How can I build that bridge?”
Alan Goffinski seems to have found an answer. As executive director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, he has poured his organizational efforts into a partnership with the UVA music department to create the Telemetry Music Series, a monthly event that features both student and local performers.
When he took on the role a couple years ago, Goffinski says he “wanted to build on the assets that Charlottesville already has.” He recognized the enormous resources possessed by the music department and, with the help of its technical director Travis Thatcher, created Telemetry. The goal was to foster a “cross-pollination of ideas,” he explains. Based on the typical crowds at the events, which he judges to be half Charlottesville residents and half UVA students, the two have succeeded.
“Some students are less inclined to explore the quirkiness of their community,” Goffinski admits. “There’s oftentimes not a perceived reason to venture out…we like to try to provide that reason—to show students what they might be missing.”
Even if you’re not artistically minded, he urges students to better appreciate their city. “I would ultimately just recommend that students look around every now and then at what might be happening in the community in general…Charlottesville is less than five miles wide. There’s no excuse.”
Julia Kudravetz is making a focused effort to attract UVA students, as well as recent graduates, like assistant manager Sarah Valencia, to New Dominion Bookshop’s events.
Eze Amos
Julia Kudravetz
considers the two
communities
inextricably linked. “The fate of the town
is tied to the fate of UVA, and we need to be more aware of each other’s communities.”
Rather than see a divide between the university and the rest of the city, a tendency both students and locals can fall prey to,
Stark vision: Tennessee Williams arrived as a playwright when The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago in 1944, and then quickly moved to Broadway where it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1945. Williams’ semi-autobiographical story of a struggling family, set in a St. Louis apartment, gets a stripped-down black box treatment by director Kendall Aiguier Stewart, who “highlights the bare bones of this classically constructed modern masterpiece.”
Through 5/11. $10-15, times vary. Gorilla Theater, 1717 Allied Ln. gorillatheaterproductions.com.
Founded in 2011, Gorilla Theater stresses the troupe’s efforts at comprehensive inclusion, and with Summer Shorts 2018, that quest includes UVA students. In this production, the theater’s core players work together with student performers and directors to put on shows ranging from the whimsical to the surreal to the intensely dramatic.
Nearly every Christmas, as the Stewart family unwraps its gifts, someone asks, “Who got the new Dennis Lehane book?”
The answer is usually “everyone,” says Kendall Stewart, exaggerating only slightly about her family’s Lehane“obsession,” which began more than a decade ago when Stewart’s mother photographed the Boston-born crime and mystery writer. They’ve read most everything he’s written—Mystic River, Gone, Baby, Gone, The Drop, to name a few—and seen the film adaptations and followed Lehane’s writing on HBO’s “The Wire” and “Boardwalk Empire.”
Stewart, an actress and on-air radio host for 106.1 The Corner, was 16 when Coronado: Stories, a book of five short stories and a play, made the family rounds in 2006. She loved the play and thought, “This is so messed up. This is so dark. I want to do it.” But the content seemed out of reach for a high school production.
“I forgot about it,” says Stewart, a company member of Charlottesville’s Gorilla Theater Productions, until last year, when a family friend mentioned Lehane’s Shutter Island in a social media post.
Stewart immediately proposed Coronado to GTP. Seven yeses, a year of planning and months of rehearsals later, the play opens Wednesday, prior to the company taking it to the Capital Fringe festival in July.
Stewart describes Coronado as “suspenseful, a thriller, a mystery,” its first act a series of scenes focused on three conversations. There’s Gina and her lover, Will, plotting to kill Gina’s husband; a psychiatrist and his female patient conspicuously meeting outside the office; and there’s Bobby and his dad, a career criminal who’s raised his son to swindle and run scams before running out of town—the two are looking for a missing diamond and Bobby’s missing girlfriend, Gwen (played by Stewart).
The storylines intersect, and, as New York Times theater critic Neil Genzlinger pointed out in his review of the Invisible City Theater Company’s December 2005 production of “Coronado” at Manhattan Theater Source (in which Gerry Lehane originated the role of Bobby’s dad), “The playwright doles it all out at an admirable speed, so that you’re figuring the secrets out just about the time he’s revealing them—not an easy trick.”
And while the play text itself is “a roadmap, and it tells you what’s important,” says Jack Rakes, (Gorilla Theater’s tech director who plays Bobby), it’s the company’s job to look at the text and highlight the relationships and themes, while remaining true to the writer’s intention.
There’s something special about staging a play so focused on intimate relationships between characters in a black box theater, says Anna Lien, Gorilla Theater founder and artistic and managing director, who plays Gina. It keeps the focus on the actors and their characters instead of physical production elements. Rakes says it’s “always the hardest thing, to have private moments in public, and to forget that you’re on stage.”
In this production, the close-talking that happens in the stage bar mimics what happens in a real-life bar. A server, played by Charlie Gilliam, adds another level of reality—his character interrupts the conversations, walking in at inopportune moments, as often happens in restaurants and bars.
Gilliam’s waiter sets Gorilla Theater’s production of Coronado apart from the rest in a major way, one that Lehane himself had to approve before Gorilla Theater could proceed. Lehane wrote the part as a woman having an affair with one of the married men in the play, but because Gorilla Theater is committed to inclusivity and to LGBTQ+ positivity, Stewart wanted the waiter to be a man. Lehane approved Stewart’s proposed amendment to the script and wrote it into the contract that he and Stewart signed.
Though a seemingly small adjustment, “that gender swap amplified a lot of the tension and dynamic betwixt the characters in the love triangle with the waiter,” says Lien, particularly because a gay relationship is “so far outside societal norms from when/where the play is set” in small-town America.
Most of the characters in Coronado are thrill-seekers trying to get away from the monotony of small-town life—they run cons, have tumultuous affairs and blur ethical lines. But, Bobby, tired of excitement, craves the mundane.
This paradox is something Gorilla Theater knows fairly well itself, as it aims to stage the classics with a twist alongside “edgy contemporaries,” says Lien. In fact, many Gorilla Theater actors have found themselves a outside of their usual routines as Coronado’s content requires them to “go darker” than they’ve ever gone before.
The production reminds the cast and crew to return “to truth and essentials,” says Lien, to trust a script, revel in apparent simplicity and allow great complexity to reveal itself in moments of absolute truth.
The play is called Coronado, but it’s not set in the California resort city. Or in Kansas, Canada, Uruguay, Panama, Mexico or any other town, village or municipality called Coronado. Instead it’s a plot point in the play. Something happens in Coronado that creates a conversation that leads to—well, let’s just say, other things.
Do you love stories? And not only the provocative ones, but the tales of the everyday and the mundane? Then Gorilla Theatre Productions has a seat for you at …Huh? A group of tale-swappers present tropes that they aren’t sure what to make of, and invites the audience to ponder with them. How these stories unfold will depend on listening ears and open minds to make sense of the ambiguous accounts.
If laughter is the best medicine, then consider Herron’s Entertainment Comedy Night a health class from out of town. Composed of emerging comedians from New York City, these missionaries of hilarity dish out gut-busting tropes that are certain to heal frowny face outbreaks. Bent Theatre partners in the mad merriment by adding local stand-up to the bill.
Are you alone? Are you searching? Do you have visions? Have you been receiving their messages? These are the questions posed in the bio of Asheville, North Carolina’s Playdate, a band that credits a distressed mental state for its inception. The duo joins heartfelt, modern synth-pop outfit Synthetic Division, along with the raw beats of Lamar B, for an evening that benefits Cville Pride.