“Grounds…A Blackcast” is a 10-episode audio show centered around five black professors teaching at a small, private, predominantly white institution in the South. Charlottesville-based actor Will Jones (shown) lends his voice to Ivan Wilson, a scholar of Russian poetry. Photo by Eze Amos
Acting looks a bit different for Will Jones this summer. Instead of being onstage with the Charlottesville Players Guild, he’s sitting at home, in front of a microphone, wearing headphones so he can hear himself and his castmates as they read from their scripts for “Grounds…A Blackcast,” an original 10-episode audio drama.
Some aspects of the craft haven’t changed for Jones. He still gets into character by laughing, sighing, furrowing his brow, smiling broadly, gesticulating wildly, and using his body to affect the emotion in his voice.
And, perhaps most importantly, by voicing one of the five main characters in the podcast created by Leslie Scott-Jones, the Charlottesville-based actor is still making black theater.
Scott-Jones created “Grounds” after considering the history of black life in mainstream entertainment, starting with the controversial “Amos ‘n’ Andy” radio-turned- television program and continuing with sitcoms like “Martin” and others.
These shows tend to “follow the same formula,” says Scott-Jones: the hijinks of the common man and his wife/girlfriend and best friend. Some have broken that mold and center on black women (“Living Single,” “Insecure”), or black college students (“A Different World,” “Dear White People”), but there’s room for more representations of black life.
“Grounds” is about five black professors at a small, private PWI (predominantly white institution) in the South, and the first episode premieres Thursday, June 11, on the Eugene Martin LLC SoundCloud page. Scott-Jones called upon some of her black Ph.D.-holding friends (including locals A.D. Carson and Munier Nazeer) to advise on the scripts. They shared their passion for educating their students and for research, as well as the unique challenges they face in academia, and how that affects their places in black communities. Black academics are often made to feel shut out of both worlds.
“It was the opportunity to write some really wonderful characters,” says Scott-Jones.
There’s Elijah Augustus Wright (played by Doug Spearman), a professor of civil engineering who is up for tenure. A gay man raised in a preacher’s home, he never mentions his family and hasn’t introduced his boyfriend of 10 years to his friends. Early on in the series, he’s accused of trading sexual favors for grades.
Ivan Wilson (voiced by Jones) is a professor of 17th-century Russian literature who met and married his wife while studying in Russia. He reads his own poetry at a local open mic night, and fears the U.S. government is watching him because of his ties to Russia.
Like Ivan, drug design and development professor Khai Muhammed Ali (James J. Johnson) thinks the government’s keeping an eye on him, but for different reasons: He’s a devout Muslim raised by a Black Panther father, and his research focuses on growing and testing cannabis for use in treating various health issues facing black communities.
Ethnomusicologist Kwasi Adofo Sika (Kevin Troy) is an expert on African influences within hip-hop, but he prefers to listen to English punk and The Beatles. Born in Ghana and raised in the U.K., he’s the only professor in this cohort who did not attend an HBCU for any of his degrees.
Parthenia Jacqueline “P.J.” Wiley-Reid (voiced by Scott-Jones), is a tenured professor and chair of the African and African American studies department. She and her husband have two children, and her signature color is red.
This variety is what made Spearman, whose acting credits include roles on “Girlfriends,” “The Hughleys,” “Star Trek: Voyager,” and “Noah’s Arc,” agree to lend his voice. Too often, black male roles are “either some kind of supervillain or superhero,” he says. “We’re very rarely the kind of guys that we are.” Even on shows heralded for their portrayals of black life, “the men are usually there as problems to be overcome, or fixed, or dealt with,” says Spearman, who adds that he struggles to think of any series where “a black guy is the lead and he’s not some kind of extreme” or stereotype. “This is a lot more middle ground,” he says, “a lot more relatable.”
Spearman says that Scott-Jones welcomes collaboration from the actors in order to achieve that relatability. He contributed some dialogue to what he says is “the best scene I’ve had in a long time,” in episode two, a conversation between Elijah and the university’s white president. “It’s full of righteous indignation and truth,” says Spearman. Elijah “[stands] up for himself in a way that I have not had a chance to play before…it’s a guy going up against the homophobic, color-phobic policies of the university.”
Jones valued the chance to make his audience laugh instead of cry for once. His favorite scene is one in which his character, Ivan, meets up with ethnomusicologist Kwasi before a Kendrick Lamar concert. Ivan cracks up and lovingly teases his friend, who is dressed in a white T-shirt and black-and-red plaid pants, saying he looks prepped to pogo at a punk show rather than a rap concert.
“Grounds,” says Spearman, gives black men a voice “in the myriad spectrum that being a black man comes in. We’re not monolithic.”
The show comments on black female experience, too: The inclusion of P.J. as the only female character magnifies “the trap that most black women find themselves in, of having to be mama to everybody, and forgetting they have to mama themselves, too,” says Scott-Jones. But that’s not to say P.J. gets no support from the men. This is “a community of black people that really do honor each other, care for each other.”
And in this moment, as the country continues to protest ongoing police killings of black people, these are necessary things not just to convey, but to uplift, says Scott-Jones.
“Representation matters,” she says. “And the more of the spectrum of blackness that can be shown, the better.”
Leslie Scott-Jones says the tarot can tell us what we need to know. Learn how to listen by taking her online course, Demystify Tarot, beginning on May 20. For more information, go to thebridgepai.org.
A few years ago, Leslie Scott-Jones was wandering around the Aquarian Bookshop on West Main Street in Richmond, looking for lavender incense. Walking by a table of tarot card decks, she received a message from one of her maternal great-grandmothers: “That one.”
Scott-Jones stopped—she’d learned to listen to these messages when she received them—looked at the table, and asked, “Which one?”
“That one, down there.” On the bottom shelf were two decks, and Scott-Jones felt guided to one of them, the Dreams of Gaia deck.
She’d felt a connection to spirits since she started having déjà vu when she was about 6 years old, but this was her first tarot deck, and the timing seemed appropriate—she’d recently begun hearing from more and more of her ancestors and had started consciously tuning in to this aspect of herself. Tarot was another way she could focus on those messages.
For those who are curious about their own connections to spirits, Scott-Jones leads a Demystify Tarot course online via The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative that includes four two-hour sessions, held on consecutive Wednesdays. Courses start on May 20, June 17, and July 15.
Leslie Scott-Jones is an intuitive reader, which means she uses her mediumship when she reads tarot cards for herself and others. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
Scott-Jones is perhaps best known in town as an activist, a theater artist, and a musician (she’s artistic director of the Charlottesville Players Guild and sings in the Eugene Martin Band, among other groups), but she’s also a reader and a medium who has studied Spiritualism and psychic sciences at Arthur Findlay College in England.
But those who sign up for the course don’t need to have any sort of pre-existing (or rather, pre-acknowledged) connection to the metaphysical. “Anyone can learn to read tarot,” says Scott-Jones. “If you feel yourself called to do it, you can do it.”
While tarot reading is sometimes treated like hokum, or a magic trick, akin to gazing into a crystal ball to tell the future, Scott-Jones says the practice is just another way of accessing spirituality, like prayer or meditation. “People think about metaphysical things as ‘other,’” she says. “They think about it as something that they can’t do, or [that] they have to be initiated into. The truth is that everyone has it. Some people might call it something different, but every one of us has a connection to spirit, and it’s up to us how well we work that muscle. That’s really all it is—it’s working the muscle, it’s learning how they [the spirits] communicate with you, what it means when they show you certain things, and learning to listen to that still, quiet voice. Along that journey, you discover things that you never would have known,” including how many other people have their own highly personal connections to the metaphysical, whether it’s through religion or other belief systems.
“Whatever you believe about ‘the other side,’ let’s call it, tarot is a way to connect to those energies,” says Scott-Jones, and understanding the tarot deck—where it comes from, what each card means, and how to follow one’s intuition during a reading—is the warm-up to the exercise.
Much like the four-suited standard decks currently used to play poker, spades, bridge, and other games, tarot cards were originally used for parlor games, specifically, a bridge-like game called tarocchi, which was popular among Italian nobles (who had leisure time) in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Variations of the game and its cards spread throughout Europe over the next few centuries, and by the late 18th century, when Spiritualism became trendy in western Europe and the United States, people were using tarot cards—which are full of imagery and symbolism—in cartomancy, or divination via cards, a practice much, much older than the tarot deck itself.
Interest in the metaphysical, in astrology and in tarot in particular, is again on the rise, says Scott-Jones, and as a result, artists and readers are creating all sorts of tarot decks. While each deck differs slightly in design and outlook, most are based on the 78-card Rider-Waite deck, initially available in 1909 and mass-produced in the U.S. throughout the 20th century. (This is the one you likely see in your mind’s eye when envisioning tarot cards.)
Like the Rider-Waite, most modern tarot decks include a major arcana (trump cards like The Fool, The Magician, Death, etc.), and a minor arcana comprised of four suits (such as pentacles, wands, swords, cups) of numbered cards. Each trump card, each suit, each number, has its own meaning, and Scott-Jones will spend the first three classes explaining them. The fourth week is reserved for the court cards, which can be a bit more difficult to read because their specificity offers up a lot of room for interpretation, and that can be intimidating for a beginning reader.
When individual cards are pulled together in a reading, they take on new meaning, and learning to decipher the combination of cards that comes up in each unique reading takes not just the knowledge Scott-Jones hopes to impart, but time, practice, and courage.
“You need to be open to ingesting the information, and you have to be brave enough to share the insights” gathered from the cards, she says, and that’s especially challenging when the cards are telling you something you don’t want to hear. “The cards are there to tell you what you need to know.”
“It’s not magic. There is no right or wrong. There is no good or bad. It is what it is. It’s a tool to use to navigate your life.”
“If a reader is doing it right, it should feel like a therapy session,” says Scott-Jones, who emphasizes that interpreting cards is always a very personal thing, and folks must learn to read for themselves before reading for others. “It should feel like you’re getting some sort of insight into who you are, who you want to be.”
Devon Sproule is one of the Front Porch music teachers offering online lessons for her students. It’s helped her maintain some sense of routine and personal connection in this very uncertain, socially distant time, and she hopes it’s doing this same for her students. Photo by Paul Curreri
As we adjust to life amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ll likely turn to the arts—a favorite poem, a beloved album, a treasured painting—over and over in search of comfort and relief. Art, in all its forms, is a vital part not just of our personal lives but of our community. Social distancing measures and the resulting venue closures have turned the local creative world upside down, both for individual artists and the organizations that support them. Here’s what some of those folks are saying about the state of the arts in Charlottesville, and what might come next.
St. Patrick’s Day was supposed to be Matthew O’Donnell’s busiest day of the entire year. A multi-instrumentalist who specializes in Irish music, he was booked for 15 hours of serenading audiences, from senior center residents to late-night beer-swigging revelers.
But this year, his St. Paddy’s calendar was wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads throughout the United States, Virginia governor Ralph Northam has banned all nonessential gatherings of more than 10 people. In response, local venues that support the arts—concert halls, theaters, galleries, bookshops, libraries, restaurant-bars, you name it—have shuttered their doors for an undetermined amount of time.
This leaves O’Donnell and many other artists in Charlottesville without physical places to share their work—not just for art’s sake, but for a living. It’s also worth noting that many local artists participate in the service industry and gig economy—they tend bar, wait tables, work retail, drive ride-shares, and more. And most of those jobs are gone, or paused until, well, who knows when.
O’Donnell makes his entire living from performances, and he looks forward to the month of March—in large part because of St. Patrick’s Day—when he can bring in twice what he makes in an averagemonth, to make up for the lean ones (namely January and February).
“I began to get concerned in late February,” as the senior communities closed their doors to visitors, says O’Donnell, and that concern grew as gigs canceled one by one during the first couple weeks of March. “I thought the worst-case scenario would be that everything would shut down, but I honestly didn’t think the worst-case scenario would come.”
Matthew O’Donnell, who has seen his gig calendar wiped clean by the threat of COVID-19, hosted a concert via Facebook Live on March 18. “It went astoundingly well,” he says. “A boatload of people tuned in, [made] lots of requests. People sent videos of them and their families dancing to the music. It was really beautiful.” Photo by Katie McCartney
At first, “it was a professional worry of realizing that all of my business is gone,” says O’Donnell, who hopes he can make some money by playing donation-based virtual concerts. But the worry, the sadness, has turned personal: “These people are my friends,” he says of his audiences, particularly those folks at the senior centers. When he sings with them, he says he “feels something profound. And [now] I can’t go see my friends. I do want to be looking forward to the next thing…but all I know is that the next thing I do is going to be very different from what I’ve been doing.”
Graphic novelist Laura Lee Gulledge knows that, too. “I’m friends with change and constant reinvention,” she says.As a full-time artist Gulledge relies not just on book sales and illustration commissions but art teaching residencies. She says she often feels like she’ll “get by on the skin of my teeth, but [I] make it work.” Artists are always having to come up with new business models, she says. “It’s implode or evolve.”
Her new book, The Dark Matter of Mona Starr, is scheduled to be released on April 7, and she planned to launch it at last week’s Virginia Festival of the Book. But the festival was canceled due to the threat of COVID-19, as was the rest of her North American book tour.
In a way, the book is more relevant than Gulledge could have predicted, or ever wanted to imagine. The protagonist, Mona, is a sensitive and creative teen learning to live with anxiety and depression. In the back of the book, Gulledge includes a guide for creating a self-care plan for particularly dark and stressful times, and she shares her own.
“It’s like my masterpiece,” she says of The Dark Matter of Mona Starr. “I was finally mentally prepared to own it and step into it, and start conversations about mental health and not feel like a fraud.”
Rather than consider the whole thing a wash, Gulledge will do a virtual book tour via Facebook Live, where she’ll be talking about topics such as drawing through depression and cultivating healthy artistic practices.
The Front Porch roots music school is also pivoting to an online lessons model, to keep instructors paid and to keep students in practice. Songwriter Devon Sproule (who had to cancel her upcoming U.K. tour) usually teaches somewhere around 80 students a week between group classes and private lessons, and, so far, a handful of them have made the leap to live virtual lessons. Keeping the routine and personal connection of a lesson could be particularly important right now, says Sproule. She had to teach one young pupil how to tune a ukulele, a task Sproule had taken on in their in-person lessons. “I had no idea this kid could tune their own ukulele, and I don’t think they did either,” says Sproule. “I think it was empowering.”
The Charlottesville Players Guild, the city’s only black theater troupe, has postponed its run of August Wilson’s Radio Golf, originally scheduled to premiere at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center April 16. The paid cast and crew were in the middle of rehearsals, and while they hope to be able to open the show on April 30, things are still very uncertain, says CPG artistic director Leslie Scott-Jones. “When you hear medical professionals say this might go through July or longer, it’s like, ‘What’ll we do?’”
Leslie Scott-Jones, a singer and theater artist who relies on performance for all of her income, is one of many Charlottesville artists left wondering what’s next, as venues have closed due to the threat of COVID-19. Publicity photo
The JSAAHC has also had to cancel two benefit concerts for Eko Ise, a music conservatory program for local black children, that the center hoped to launch later this year. Now, they’ll be months behind in that fundraising effort, says Scott-Jones.
The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, which provides not only a physical gallery space for visual and performance art, but funding for public art and after-school programs, has canceled all in-person events (though it is finding creative ways for people to participate from a distance, such as its virtual Quarantine Haiku video series). The Bridge has also postponed its annual Revel fundraiser, originally scheduled for May 2. Revel brings in between 20 and 30 percent of the organization’s operating budget for the year, says director Alan Goffinski,
Gulledge makes an excellent case for continued support of the arts as we face uncertainty: “This is the sort of moment where people will look to the creative thinkers to generate hope, and to generate positivity and be beacons of light in this moment of darkness. This is part of our purpose.”
The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative and New City Arts announced Friday, March 20, that it has established the Charlottesville Emergency Relief Fund for Artists. We will have more information on that soon.
The Front Porch and WTJU 91.1 FM are also teaming up to broadcast live concerts Friday and Wednesday evenings. Follow us at @cville_culture on Twitter for regular updates about virtual arts events that will take place over the coming weeks.
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.
Opening on May 17 at Live Arts, The Royale delivers knockout performances through June 8. Image; Martyn Kyle.
Ring true: Boxer Jack Johnson became the first African American world heavyweight champion, and at the height of the Jim Crow era he was “the most famous and the most notorious African American on Earth,” according to documentarian Ken Burns. Directed by multi-faceted artist and C-VILLE contributor Leslie Scott-Jones, The Royale, written by Marco Ramirez, is loosely based on Johnson’s story and delves into a boxer’s psyche as he faces the fight of the century when the sport was still racially segregated.
Through6/8. $21-26, times vary. Live Arts, 123 E. Water St. 977-4177.
Leslie Scott-Jones (left) and Richelle Claiborne (right) sing the songs of Nina Simone at The Front Porch on Saturday, April 27. Photo by Jay Pun
When Nina Simone died in 2003, Elton John sent flowers with the message, “You were the greatest and I love you.” That sentiment has been echoed by countless others, and tributes to Simone aim to capture her seductive, hypnotic genius. Richelle Claiborne and Leslie-Scott Jones rekindle the vocal magic during A Night With Nina, with Carl “Killa” Brown on drums, Vic Brown on bass, Allen Ponton on sax, Ellis Williams on trumpet, and Ivan Orr on keys, which celebrates the indelible artistry of the “High Priestess of Soul.”
Saturday, April 27. $12-15, 8pm. The Front Porch, 221 E. Water St. 806-7062.
Manhattan-based artist Ed Woodham has produced Art in Odd Places for more than 15 years all over the country. The University of Virginia, where he had 28 artists interpret the theme of “Matter,” is the first place one of the performances was canceled.
Eze Amos
When the student-run UVA Studio Arts Board asked New York artist Ed Woodham to bring his Art in Odd Places to the university, he wanted local artists to take part in the public visual and performance art, and the centerpiece of the two-day April event featured local theater artists Leslie Scott-Jones and Brandon Lee.
Two days before the performance, their project was canceled because of objections of black students and the Office of African-American Affairs. The artists say they were censored, and the dean of the OAAA says re-enactment of the enslaved laborers who built the university would be humiliating. Both sides say the other is “misinformed.”
Leslie Scott-Jones had planned a celebration of the slaves who built the University of Virginia, but the Art in Odd Places performance was canceled after objections from black students and the Office of African-American Affairs. File photo
“My idea was to have a historical re-enactment on the Lawn using research from UVA’s Commission on Slavery,” she says. That was for April 5. The next day, she wanted Queen Charlotte, who was black and for whom Charlottesville was named, to be in a parade with fife and drums from the university to the Downtown Mall, where Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would present her with the keys to the city.
Scott-Jones contacted Lee, who had been a re-enactor as a child at Colonial Williamsburg and who was a 2006 UVA grad. “As an artist, I wanted to do something in line with historical interpretation” that would include the experience of slave laborers and the first minority students at UVA, he says.
“Other than my senior research, that’s the most time I’ve spent on anything,” he says.
Scott-Jones recruited five professional re-enactors, who agreed to participate in “Historical Matters” at reduced rates, she says. She obtained permit paperwork for the parade and sent it to UVA to submit as the entity that was sponsoring the event, she says.
Then she heard that an emergency meeting of the Black Presidents Council—the student presidents of all the black organizations on Grounds—was being held the night of April 2 and was told, “None of the students knew about it, they didn’t want slave re-enactments and didn’t approve it,” she says.
She and Lee were not invited to the meeting, but showed up anyway. “The meeting got a little heated,” says Lee.
Lee, who is community advisor to his Phi Beta Sigma fraternity, says he was surprised to hear the students say they had not been advised about the project. “It’s totally inaccurate,” he says. “I pulled up an email I’d sent [to one of them]. Nobody responded.”
The students voted 14-0 against the project, with three abstentions.
Maurice Apprey, dean of the Office of African-American Affairs, says he first heard about the performance four days before it was scheduled. “A student came to me and said, ‘Someone came to our door and asked if we wanted to be slaves,’” he says. “Can you imagine how upset you’d be as a parent?”
An email to Pat Lampkin, UVA vice president and chief student affairs officer, signed by Apprey and three other deans in his office, says, “The pretext of the entire project was clearly offensive.”
The deans wrote, “We shudder at the thought of having to explain to concerned parents, students and alumni that our black and non-black students are being asked to play roles of humiliation; namely, the enslaved and slave-owning.” They also shuddered at the idea of prospective students and their parents coming upon such an event while considering attendance at UVA.
UVA denies canceling the event. “Given serious concerns raised by minority student groups regarding the nature of the performances, Ms. Scott-Jones agreed not to proceed with the events planned for April 5 in order that additional dialogue and discussion might occur with those groups,” says spokesperson Anthony de Bruyn. “When the university subsequently learned that the necessary parade permits had not been obtained from the city for the events planned for April 6, this concern was raised with Ms. Scott-Jones who subsequently decided to cancel the events planned for that date.”
“The first part of that is a lie,” says Scott-Jones. She says Dirron Allen, assistant dean of students and director of student activities, told her, “We can’t allow you to do anything planned for Thursday.”
She says, “We canceled Friday because at that point, our artistic vision was ruined.”
Allen did not respond to Scott-Jones’ characterization of the cancellation, but de Bruyn says, “The Arts Board proposes artistic events for the university to consider hosting, and these proposed events are subject to the university’s review and approval.”
Woodham says he had received approval from the Arts Board. “I’ve worked for universities, civic organizations and cities. Nothing’s ever been censored before. We followed the Arts Board procedure. This was very last minute.” And, he says, the decision was “based on misinformation.”
Apprey calls the project “haphazard” and “misinformed”—but says, “I don’t have the right to censor anyone.”
And he compares it to asking Jewish students at Hillel House if they’d like to go to an Auschwitz re-enactment.
“The OAAA objected strongly and I would have been very upset if it had happened in spite of our objections,” he says. “Can you imagine after tiki torches on our Grounds, an enactment of a slave auction on our Grounds?”
He also suggests, “Before seeking refuge in an expression of ‘free’ speech, could we ask: Is what we are about to say or do a good idea?”
“The decision to cancel was troubling,” says Larry Goedde, chair of the department of art, who says he would be meeting with Dean of Students Allen Groves to learn what led to the decision and to clarify what the policy would be going forward.
“How is it wounding to celebrate the people who built the university?” asks Scott-Jones, who says there was no slave auction planned and that the objectors, had they talked to the artists, could have gotten an accurate picture of what they planned to do.
“You’ve got these black students so ashamed of their history, they want to ignore it,” she says.
“I am sad that after everything this town went through in August, they still don’t understand the real problem,” says Scott-Jones. “The reason Nazis could come here is because we haven’t paid attention to the other part of our history.”
Scott-Jones traces her ancestry to 1793 in Scottsville. “This is my history,” she says. “For the deans of the Office of African-American Affairs to assume this was anything but meticulously put together is ludicrous and offensive.”
The Charlottesville Players Guild is performing Joe Turner's Come and Gone through April 29. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
She’d been here before.
During a recent rehearsal of August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a feeling of recollection overcame Brenda Brown-Grooms as she recited her lines. She was in character as Bertha Holly, wife of Seth Holly and a boarding house matron who likes to bake biscuits, make coffee and care for her tenants with warmth and laughter. But Brown-Grooms knew it was more than a line that’d tipped off her déjà vu.
She glanced down at her feet, and when Brown-Grooms looked back up and out into the auditorium, she traveled back in time to when she was a second-grader, sitting in that very spot on the very same wooden stage, pretending to sew an American flag out of construction paper, a pair of brand-new sky-blue patent leather shoes peeking out from beneath her Betsy Ross costume.
She had, indeed, been here before.
“I just knew I was gorgeous,” says Brown-Grooms, laughing as she recalls the memory of her first play. “I don’t suspect Betsy had sky-blue shoes,” she says, but that didn’t matter one bit to young Brenda. “[Betsy] looked like me that day,” like a sky-blue shoe-wearing African-American second-grader attending the Jefferson School in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early 1960s.
“I like this,” she remembers thinking.
Brown-Grooms, who fell in love with reading out loud as soon as her teacher, Mrs. Cage, introduced her to the alphabet in the first grade, had found the play on a school bookshelf just two weeks before and asked if she could perform it for the class. “Why not the whole school?” Brown-Grooms remembered Mrs. Cage asking.
And while Brown-Grooms liked performing, she loved knowing that “you can have an idea, and all of a sudden it’s born.”
Brown-Grooms, co-pastor of New Beginnings Christian Community here in Charlottesville, describes herself as “a diva and a ham.” She’s taught New Testament Greek language and grammar at the college level, she’s preached in cities all over the country, and has joined a theater troupe in every city she’s lived in: New York, New Jersey, California and elsewhere. But when she moved back to Charlottesville in 2011, she couldn’t find a troupe that seemed more fun than competitive.
The Reverend Brenda Brown-Grooms plays the role of Bertha Holly in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which runs through April 29 at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. Brown-Grooms first performed on this stage in the early 1960s, as a second-grader at Jefferson Elementary School. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
Last September, Brown-Grooms caught a performance of Wilson’s Jitney, produced by the Charlottesville Players Guild on the Jefferson School stage, and she says she knew, in that moment, “I had found my peeps.”
“I am going to be in an August Wilson play,” Brown-Grooms declared after the lights went down. A few months later, she auditioned for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and nabbed the role of Bertha Holly. And when Brown-Grooms steps onto the Jefferson School auditorium stage on opening night on April 18, she’ll again be wearing sky blue—this time, a dress.
The backstory
Built with funds raised by the African-American community and the Freedmen’s Aid Society, the Jefferson Graded School building on Fourth St. NW opened in 1895 to provide an all-grades school for black children. At that time, and for some time after, Charlottesville public schools enrolled white children only. In a 2017 article for Vinegar Hill magazine, titled “Black Theater Charlottesville,” Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and local theater artist Leslie Scott-Jones wrote that “at the center of the new structure was a stage where students practiced elocution and presented Christmas pageants…there is ample evidence that performance was an important aspect of Charlottesville’s African American cultural life,” both at the school and in local black churches, which supported plenty of religious pageants throughout the year.
The school was rebuilt in 1926, as the city’s first high school for black students, and was expanded four times, and still, the auditorium and its stage remained a center of activity even when the school became Jefferson Elementary School in 1951. The 1941 edition of Crimson & Black, the Jefferson School yearbook, counted 59 students as members of the dramatics club, and by 1944, that number had doubled, and the group participated in the Virginia State Theater competition in Petersburg, Virginia, up until 1951, Douglas and Scott-Jones note in the Vinegar Hill article.
Many of the dramatics club students later became members of the Charlottesville Players Guild, an adult theater group that, the article notes, had as many as 40 participants at the height of its membership. Started in the mid-1950s, the all-African-American troupe performed one- and three-act plays in the Charlottesville area and throughout the region and “remained a mainstay of local community theater into the late 1960s.”
Over the years, many students from the Jefferson High School dramatics club (pictured here in 1945-46) went on to perform with the Charlottesville Players Guild, active in the Charlottesville Area through the 1960s. Photo from Crimson and Black, 1945-46 Jefferson High School Yearbook
Douglas first heard about the Charlottesville Players Guild from Mary Anderson, a Jefferson School alumna who Douglas believes is the only surviving member of the original guild. Douglas has learned a bit about the guild from Anderson, from Crimson & Black and from photography books that chronicle black life in Charlottesville through the 20th century, but says it’s been difficult to find information on which plays the troupe performed—active from the 1940s to ’60s—and when.
Douglas, who has served as executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center since it opened in 2012, says that supporting artists of color is an important part of honoring the school’s heritage. In addition to spaces devoted to exhibits on local African-American history, the center has gallery rooms that regularly house the work of local African-American visual artists like Yolonda Coles Jones, Lisa Beane and Frank Walker, and Douglas says she’d long hoped to stage the plays of Wilson—America’s foremost African-American playwright who twice won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, for Fences in 1987 and for The Piano Lesson in 1990—on the Jefferson School stage.
“If you’re going to announce yourself as an institution that addresses the 20th-century African-American experience in the most interdisciplinary way, there is no other artist that does it as completely and thoroughly as August Wilson does,” Douglas says.
What’s more, she says, when one considers “the broad scope of the arts in Charlottesville and its focus on ‘Americana,’ loosely defined,” one realizes “what isn’t part of ‘Americana’ on a consistent basis,” and that which isn’t often part of that Charlottesville Americana is art that explores and depicts the African-American experience.
Douglas mentioned her desire to stage Wilson plays on an episode of “Home Grown,” an arts talk show on WPVC radio that Scott-Jones, a longtime local theater artist, often hosts.
Scott-Jones, who studied theater at VCU and has participated in various community theater productions at Live Arts, PlayOn Theatre, Gorilla Theater and elsewhere, was ready to go all-in. She wanted the chance to stage Wilson plays in Charlottesville, and the chance to give actors, directors and producers of color the opportunity to participate in theater that was written expressly for them. She wanted to do black theater.
Black theater, Scott-Jones explains, happens when a black director produces a work with black actors playing black characters written by a black playwright. Wilson’s plays fit this bill; the playwright had an unofficial condition that no white directors should direct his plays.
Black actors playing black characters does not necessarily qualify a play as black theater. Plays like Dreamgirls and The Wiz (both of which have been produced with great success at Live Arts in recent years) tell stories about black characters, but they are written by white men and thus view African-American life through that lens.
Turns out, that’s the lens through which most theater produced in America is viewed.
The November/December 2015 issue of The Dramatist published the findings of The Count, an ongoing study by the Lilly Awards in partnership with the Dramatists Guild, which analyzed three years of data from productions in regional theaters in America. It found that 78 percent of the plays produced in American community theaters are written by men (63 percent of the plays produced in American community theaters are written by American white men, 6 percent by American men of color, 22 percent are written by American women, and just 3.4 percent are written by American women of color).
And so, in Charlottesville, as is the case across all of America, there are few opportunities to perform plays not written from that American white male perspective.
And while it’s true that the race of a character is not always specified in a script, Scott-Jones says that when a play is written by a white playwright, it’s often automatically assumed that that character is white, because playwrights typically write from their own perspective.
Leslie Scott-Jones has helped revive the Charlottesville Players Guild, an all-black theater troupe that was an important part of black life and culture in Charlottesville in the early part of the 20th century. So far, the new iteration of the guild has performed three August Wilson plays on the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center stage and plans to do many more. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
Scott-Jones didn’t play a black character until she was in her 30s, when she played Esther Mills in a January 2010 production of Lynn Notage’s Intimate Apparel at Live Arts. While she’s enjoyed many of her roles, including Iago’s wife, Emilia, in a production of Shakespeare’s Othello at Live Arts, and bridesmaid Georgeann in Alan Ball’s Five Women Wearing the Same Dress at ShenanArts, Scott-Jones says she trusts African-American playwrights to write characters and experiences “that are mine,” characters where she doesn’t have to ask herself—a black woman who can “never sever” herself from being black—if she should play a character with an unspecified race “white” or “black.”
She knew the value of this as an actor and wanted to open this up to other theater artists in town who had never had this experience; actors who wanted it, or who had experienced it and wanted more.
Sometime after that episode of “Home Grown,” Scott-Jones and Douglas met with Clinton Johnston and Ike Anderson, two fellow Charlottesville theater artists of color, and talked about what it would take to stage a Wilson play at the Jefferson School. The discussion of staging one play turned into a conversation about staging all 10 plays in Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle (also called the Century Cycle) over the course of five years, and reviving the Charlottesville Players Guild.
Tiff Ames, a young theater artist from Charlottesville and current student at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio, says that when the group decided to revive the troupe, they asked for, and received, Mary Anderson’s blessing to use the name.
Douglas and Scott-Jones wrote grant proposals for money to cover the costs of mounting the plays—for modest sets, costumes, lighting equipment and such—and paying the actors for their work. It’s not a lot of money, Douglas says, but she feels it’s important to pay the actors for their work to show its value.
“To even have August Wilson’s words spoken in your lifetime is valuable,” Douglas says. “His message, and what he tells you and how he describes life during Jim Crow, and moves us through that history of black people so eloquently, if you’re not experiencing those things until you’re in your 20s and 30s and moved away from here, then you’re not having the full breadth of the possibilities of what language and thought of all of those kinds of things can do for you. Those things are valuable and shouldn’t be thrown away and not considered. And the people who do the work in order to give you their best should not be thrown away in that way, either.”
Play ground
August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in Pittsburgh in 1945 to August Kittel, a German immigrant, and Daisy Wilson, an African-American woman from North Carolina whose mother reportedly walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania with the hope of finding a better life.
Wilson’s father abandoned the family when Wilson was just a boy, and he was raised mainly by his mother and maternal grandmother. He fell in love with the work of Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison when he was a teenager and at age 16 dropped out of school and worked menial jobs that allowed him to focus on reading and writing.
Playwright August Wilson.
Wilson published 16 plays throughout his life, 10 of which make up the Pittsburgh Cycle, a series of plays set mostly in Pittsburgh’s Hill district that track decade by decade the African-American experience throughout the 20th century. Each play presents a unique story, but some characters—and their offspring—appear throughout the series.
Wilson was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama five times—all for Pittsburgh Cycle plays—and won twice, for Fences in 1987 and for The Piano Lesson in 1990. Fences also won a Tony Award in 1987.
Wilson died in October 2005, just a few months after the final installment of the Pittsburgh Cycle, Radio Golf, premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut.
A New York Times article from 2009 noted that “in life, the playwright August Wilson had an all-but-official rule: no white directors for major productions of his work.” It was important to Wilson that his plays—black characters written by a black playwright for a (mostly) black cast—be directed by black directors who themselves know firsthand the black experience in 20th century America. It’s a likely reason for why his plays haven’t been more widely produced.
The staging of Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle began at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center in April 2017 with Fences, a play about a couple of garbage men in the 1950s who wonder why they can’t be garbage truck drivers, and the theater troupe has since staged two more: Jitney, about jitney cab drivers in the 1970s, in September 2017; and, currently, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in a boarding house in the 1910s. Among other things, the series examines common themes of responsibility to family and community, fatherhood, intergenerational relationships, the anxiety of change and race and racism in 20th century America.
For Ike Anderson, an actor, dancer and choreographer who grew up in Charlottesville and is currently the membership coordinator at the Music Resource Center, participating in the Charlottesville Players Guild has been revelatory.
Sometime in his late 20s, Anderson, now 31, realized that after more than a decade of performing in Live Arts productions, he’d only ever had ensemble and supporting roles in plays like The Wiz (one of his earliest Live Arts efforts) and A Chorus Line. He started wondering why he wasn’t getting the roles he felt he deserved. And while he says he never felt like he missed out on parts because of his race, “I just felt like it wasn’t my place,” he says of the theater world.
He nabbed a major role in Live Arts’ 2013 production of The Motherfucker with the Hat—which Anderson remembers was described in the theater’s program as a “verbal cage match”—and that satisfied him for a while. But even still, he started looking around “to see where else I could take it,” he says of his acting career.
He suggested Live Arts mount Dreamgirls, and Anderson, who served as associate director and choreographer for the spring 2016 production, remembers that some folks at the theater wondered where they’d find a mostly black cast for the Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen-penned musical about a trio of young black female soul singers in the 1960s. Anderson knew they’d have no problem filling the roles; put them out there and the actors would show, he said. He was right. As for high-caliber black female singers? He found at least one of them, Kim Riley, who played Effie, at a karaoke night at Wild Wing Café.
While he was happy to see lines out the doors for Dreamgirls, Anderson says he knew that wasn’t an experience likely to be replicated over and over again, even though he was involved with Live Arts’ Melanin initiative, where he and other actors of color, including Scott-Jones, held staged table reads of plays like A Raisin in the Sun with the hope of increasing the visibility of actors and playwrights of color in Charlottesville theater (Melanin is no longer active).
So when Scott-Jones approached him with the opportunity to be part of the Charlottesville Players Guild and stage a Wilson play, Anderson jumped at the chance. He first played Gabriel, the pure, exuberant World War II veteran who suffered a head injury in combat that caused irreparable brain damage, in Fences. At one point in the play, Gabriel does a dance to send his brother, Troy, up to heaven. Anderson, having a hard time finding Gabriel’s dance, talked before a rehearsal with Scott-Jones, Johnston and Ames about performing on the Jefferson School stage, on hallowed ground for black families in Charlottesville, and how “the work of our ancestors comes from the ground up.”
In that rehearsal, Anderson remembers how he closed his eyes and went beyond a script that he felt a strong connection to, one that read like the stories told by his aunts, his uncles, his parents and grandparents. “I naturally found myself towards the ground, and then coming up and sending that dance up. I never felt myself do anything like that before,” Anderson says. “It was like a warmth in a place that you could not touch. It was…it was every feeling. It was love, it was anger, it was joy, it was rage. It was freedom. I’d never felt that free, like I did in that moment.”
He says that with Wilson’s plays, “there’s already that connection, because I know that story; I’ve seen my uncles, my aunts, my family dealing with the same issues. It’s pure blackness. It may be somebody else’s story, and people of other colors can connect to it, but as an actor, it makes it that much easier and that much more challenging, because you feel an immediate connection to the character, the story. When you’re already connected to those things and you don’t know why and you find out through a play, that changes you.”
Ike Anderson has acted and danced in, and choreographed for, many theater productions in Charlottesville. He makes his directorial debut with the Charlottesville Players Guild’s production of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, where he’s helped a number of new actors find their voices. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
Anderson, who took a lead role in Jitney as the play’s fast-talking moral compass, Turnbo, makes his directorial debut with Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and feels an enormous amount of pressure with this production, both in spite of and because the Charlottesville Players Guild is telling actors of color “you can do this too. You can have your voice not only be heard, but be felt,” Anderson says. And what’s more, he says Wilson’s plays have brought him to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a black man in America.
For Ames, who fell in love with theater at age 9 while playing a sprite in a Live Arts summer camp production of The Tempest, the guild offers a place to try out some more experimental pieces of theater. Ames says that, aside from playing the title role in Cleopatra VII, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra that Scott-Jones directed at Gorilla Theater Productions in 2016, there were few opportunities to play characters of color on Charlottesville stages, and Ames didn’t even think about that until being introduced to black theater at Oberlin. “I had no connection to blackness in that world at all,” says Ames of Charlottesville theater.
Ames stage-directed Fences, and later played the role of Rena, a young woman trying to make a good life for herself and her son in a 1970s Pittsburgh that’s being boarded up in the name of urban renewal, in last fall’s Jitney.
Ames’ directorial debut for the Charlottesville Players Guild will be the summer production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth featuring an all-black cast.
Ames’ love for Shakespeare runs deep; Ames was the first black actor to win the English-Speaking Union National Shakespeare Competition in 2012 at age 16. Ames loves the poetry, the universal themes, the way reciting iambic pentameter feels so natural, like a heartbeat in one’s mouth.
With this production, Ames wants to show how African diasporan storytelling works “so beautifully” with Shakespeare. Ames says that many productions of Macbeth focus on the blood, the gore, the tragedy. “This show is not a tragedy, in my opinion,” Ames says. Instead, it’s about learning the consequences of wanting power.
Ames has cut the script and made a few other changes, such as presenting the Weird Sisters of “double, double toil and trouble” fame not as witches but as elders of the community; when those characters are introduced into the play, they’ll be dressed in all white, like the elders in an African-American Christian church ritual. The show bends gender and age, too, and Ames hopes that the guild can stage the performance annually, almost like a ritual, using these characters to warn of the desire for power over and over again.
Douglas says that part of the Charlottesville Players Guild’s charge is to allow serious theater artists like Ames “to feel as if [they] can come back to Charlottesville and function, because there’s culture and opportunity [for them]. Ultimately, if you look at the history of this place, and what causes black flight, it is the notion of opportunity and the lack thereof,” she says.
With the Charlottesville Players Guild, “I feel like I am part of something bigger,” says Ames. It’s not just about putting on a good show; it’s about putting on a good show and adding to the tradition of black theater in the Jefferson School and in Charlottesville.
Eric Jones (right) and Will Jones (left) star in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, in production at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center through April 29.
It’s also about creating something for future generations to look to. Ames is particularly moved by the fact that young black children in Charlottesville “can see black people doing beautiful things on stage,” that the two young actors in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone are able to participate in this kind of theater from such an early age. Ames is sad to have missed out on this, but is glad it’s happening now. These plays say to young actors of color, “You are welcome here.”
The work of the Charlottesville Players Guild has sparked conversation in other community theaters in town. Bree Luck, producing artistic director at Live Arts who has worked on productions with Scott-Jones, Ames, Johnston and Anderson, says that she’s looked to what the Charlottesville Players Guild is doing as a guide to how to increase diversity and equity in Charlottesville theater, while also supporting—and not competing with— it.
“I think all of us in Charlottesville need to know where our blind spots are and how we can continue to grow,” says Luck, and that includes Live Arts and other community theaters. Luck says that the conversations she’s had with Scott-Jones, Ames, Johnston, Anderson and others inspired the 2018/2019 Live Arts season, where she’ll flip the ratio outlined in that The Count survey, and present a season of plays in which about 80 percent are written by women and people of color and 20 percent are written by white men.
Human experience
When Joe Turner’s Come and Gone opens on the Jefferson School stage, its cast and crew will be carrying on a rich tradition of African-American performance in a historically black space that they hope will shape Charlottesville’s future via an understanding of its past.
Set in a boarding house in Pittsburgh in the 1910s and chronicling the lives of a few freed formerly enslaved African-Americans, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone has much to say about racism and discrimination, about the search forfamily and oneself. “This story could not be more relevant today than if it were, truly, 1911,” says Brown-Grooms. “It’s set among primarily African-Americans, but it’s just as relevant for refugees and immigrants, and anybody who’s human. It’s relevant because it’s human. And this is a time, and an age, when it’s very important to remember how we’re human, to see what it looks like, to access what it feels like, to cry together and laugh together and to go ‘Oh, my God’ together.”
As the city undergoes a close examination of its history with racism and white supremacy, as the community attempts to heal in the wake of last year’s torch-lit rallies and the Unite the Right rally that left three dead and dozens others injured on August 12, Scott-Jones says that the revival of the Charlottesville Players Guild “happening at this moment in Charlottesville was definitely divine intervention.”
Theater is “an opportunity for you to enter a life you could never live; for you to experience something that you could, or would, never do or never be,” says Scott-Jones, and that’s true for both actors and audiences. She hopes that people of all races, religions and beliefs will come to the Charlottesville Players Guild productions “with an open mind and be open to the experience of something that you think is so far removed from you and be surprised to find that it’s not.” Because while seeing these plays on the stage might mean something different for each person in the room, they are bound to mean something, because, as Charlottesville Players Guild member David Vaughn Straughn says, “this is no light work.”
Scott-Jones agrees. “As my nana would say, we are not given something that we can’t handle. And I think a lot of people in Charlottesville think we’ve been given stuff we can’t handle, without recognizing that we’ve also been given the tools to deal with it. And black theater is one of those tools. When you can understand someone else’s perspective without overlaying your own protectiveness or defensiveness over it, then you’re actually listening. Then you’re empathizing and not sympathizing…and that’s the beginning of finding a way out of it. And there is no other art form that does that better than theater.”
Leslie Scott-Jones and Brad Stoller joined Bree Luck (center) in October for the first in a season- long series of discussions on diversity, inclusivity and community as part of the theater’s
participation in The Ghostlight Project. Staff photo
The next time you use the Water Street and Second Street crosswalk, look in the Live Arts window. There’s a light on in the lobby—the theater’s ghost light. It’s small and casts yellow light from a transparent glass shade, and, according to superstition, keeps ghosts from haunting the theater after everyone leaves. Ever concerned with actors breaking legs, theaters have historically left ghost lights on for practical reasons, too. Live Arts’ Producing Artistic Director Bree Luck says empty theaters can be “treacherous,” and she’s seen more than one person fall off a darkened stage.
This ghost light also serves a more contemporary function. It illuminates Live Arts’ participation in The Ghostlight Project—a national network of individuals in the theater community who came together on January 19, 2017, the night before the presidential inauguration, to pledge their commitment to support and advocate for vulnerable communities. Live Arts was invited to join The Ghostlight Project by Moisés Kaufman, founder of Tectonic Theater Project, National Medal of Arts recipient and co-writer of The Laramie Project.
“Lighting our ghost light was just the first step in our process of being truly inclusive. It isn’t enough to say people are safe here,” Luck says. “It isn’t enough to make gender-sensitive bathroom signs. …We needed to look at the work we were doing from a broader perspective.”
Joining the project inspired Luck and the Live Arts team to begin a season-long series of roundtable discussions on diversity, inclusivity and community.
“Our discussions may be uncomfortable, or difficult to grasp,” says Luck. “We may struggle through anger, and brush up against bruises that we didn’t even know existed. But in the end, we want to make our corner of the world stronger, to give our community members a greater voice, and to help us all feel a little less alone in this day and age.”
Last year, Luck approached local activist, writer and theater professional Leslie Scott-Jones for help in initiating the conversations on diversity. Scott-Jones says this summer’s white supremacist rallies—which occurred a month before Jitney, an all-black play Scott-Jones directed at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center—added urgency to the first discussion, held at Live Arts on October 15.
“If you’re not going to have black directors and producers involved in the process of creating these stories, then you shouldn’t do black theater,” Scott-Jones says. “You don’t understand the story. People in community theater get stymied when talking about inclusion because they think it has to be on the stage. The way to be more inclusive is to attack it from behind the stage first, and to build a group of artists that sees the world differently.”
Like Scott-Jones, Brad Stoller attended the first roundtable discussion and has a long history with Live Arts. Thirty years ago, Stoller participated in the production of Sam Shephard’s A Lie of the Mind at Charlottesville High School’s black box theater—the production that led to the creation of Live Arts. He remembers one rehearsal where John D’earth introduced 19-year-old Dave Matthews, who was so nervous he clung to nearby stage equipment. Stoller agrees with Scott-Jones that change begins behind the curtain.
“We need to include people of color in aspects of direction and design,” says Stoller, who teaches theater arts at PVCC. “We can do plays where people of color act, but that’s a one-off thing. We have to really commit to having people of color be in leadership roles.”
In Live Arts’ next roundtable discussion in mid-January, Stoller wants his fellow theater professionals to make a public commitment to diversity. He and Luck think an interesting challenge would be to have all Charlottesville theaters refuse to present any piece written by a white man.
“It would force us to find the plenty of other material out there, rather than falling back on people who are well-known—who are white men,” says Stoller. “And the fear of not selling tickets, or this isn’t my audience? I don’t have the patience for it anymore.”
On Friday, Live Arts presents Sweet Charity, a musical that features a strong female protagonist. After several recent musicals with male leads, Luck says the Live Arts team was ready for a change.
“Charity embodies a pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality that feels pretty familiar to our community right now,” Luck says. “We may get knocked down, but we’ll keep forging ahead, we’ll keep dancing, and even when the odds are against us, we will still fight for love.”
“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.”
