Tag: Live Arts

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Arts Culture

WATERWORKS Festival

Supplied photo.

Celebrating theatrical works for the stage, Live Arts’ WATERWORKS Festival returns to downtown for its second iteration. The 2024 fest features pieces from local, national, and global playwrights, including one-acts, full-length performances, readings, and special events. An opening night reception and closing day wrap party bookend three weeks of theatrical excellence. The New Works section makes up the bulk of the festival, with 19 Live Arts-produced readings all helmed by local directors. The Spotlight Series presents three staged reading productions of developed scripts, each running one week. A night of local comedy and three educational workshops for community members round out the ambitious programming for this unique and expanding cultural affair.

Friday 5/17—6/2. $10–15, times, dates, and venues vary. Live Arts Theater, 123 E. Water St. livearts.org

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Culture

Follow your ears

Supplied photo.

With three stages, over 50 artists, and friends everywhere you turn, the Tom Tom Festival’s Downtown Mall Block Party is the gateway to the annual event’s creative side. From the wild focus of Bad Hat Fire and fluid moves of Capoeira Resistência C’ville, to the blasts of the No BS! Brass Band and expansive jams of Kendall Street Company, the weekend’s roaming bash gives way to the laid-back picking at Porchella along the streets of Belmont on Sunday.

Price and times vary. tomtomfoundation.org

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Arts Culture

Mary’s Christmas

From left to right, Evelyn Garey, Austen Weathersby, Ella Caplin, and N. Adora Txakeeyang bring the iconic Bennet sisters to life in Live Arts’ Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, on stage through December 17. Photo by Will Kerner.

Family gatherings during the holiday season are a universally acknowledged experience. You know, the simultaneous dread and excitement, dodging probing questions about your love life, gossiping about family members who’re in the other room, rehashing old dramas, and adding fire to new feuds. 

In Live Arts’ holiday offering, Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, characters new and beloved navigate the most joyous time of the year. Set in England in 1815, two years after Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the romantic comedy sees four of the five Bennet sisters gather at Lizzy and Darcy’s mansion to celebrate Christmas. 

With Jane and Bingley expecting, Lizzy and Darcy having tied the knot, and Lydia still married to the diabolical Mr. Wickham, it’s middle-sister Mary’s time to step into the spotlight, and perhaps find love after the arrival of an unexpected gentleman. 

Marianne Kubik was brought on to direct the play, which calls for knowledge of period movement and dialect. A UVA professor of movement and acting and a Jane-ite herself, Kubik is no stranger to Austen’s characters—in 2022, she directed Kate Hamill’s Sense and Sensibility for UVA Drama. Kubik is a longtime Live Arts collaborator, but Miss Bennet marks her first time directing for the community theater.

Kubik went through multiple rounds of casting and callbacks to ensure she found the perfect actors and partnerships. 

“I did my best to consciously put aside the characters that I know from Pride and Prejudice because this isn’t the novel, it’s a complete imagining of a previously imagined story,” says Kubik. “I wanted to look at the humans who were coming in to audition, and think about who might pair well with whom.” 

“It was worth spending all that time on callbacks because the cast really has bonded,” Kubik says. “They seem to enjoy each other’s company, and they certainly enjoy each other’s company and work on stage, and that shows.”

To play Mary, the iconic and curious black sheep of the Bennet family, Kubik cast Austen Weathersby—whose namesake is none other than Jane Austen. Benedict Burgess tackles the role of her potential paramour, Arthur de Bourgh.

Chemistry came naturally for the two actors, who first met at Live Arts 15 years ago, and grew up attending the theater’s camps and workshops.

“This whole show is a bit of a family reunion for me,” says Burgess. “I remember the very first scene that Austen and I did together, I thought she was absolutely fantastic. It’s a scene where Mary is tearing Arthur a new one verbally and she was so good, I just kept breaking. It wasn’t very professional but it was really fun.”

Embodying characters who exist in another time period can be a challenge. Weathersby and Burgess relied on their own lived experiences, and their interactions as scene partners, to find their characters’ motives and mindsets. 

“Mary is very different in this play than the person she is in Pride and Prejudice,” says Weathersby. “She’s grown a lot and developed a lot and is really finding herself. A lot of my process was going to the script and picking out specific things that I could relate to myself and things that I could research, like her interests in music, science, travel, and really try to dig into those and discover what she loves about those things.”

Arthur de Bourgh is an entirely original character, created by Miss Bennet writers Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon, so Burgess couldn’t reference the original book or any other versions for inspiration. 

“A lot of the stuff that I put into Arthur, I put in from myself because I feel a lot like him at times,” says Burgess. “He’s someone who’s kind of awkward and shy, but who still feels things very keenly and deeply and wants to express it, even if he doesn’t always have the right words for it.”

“Mary and Arthur are very different from Lizzy and Darcy and Jane and Bingley, and yet just as romantic,” Burgess continues. “They have these just absolutely passionate ideas about who they are and what the world is and what they want out of life. I think that’s going to be a very nice treat because it’s still a romance, but it allows you to see a very different kind of romantic hero.”

Immersion in Mary and Arthur’s world is made easier for Weathersby and Burgess thanks to scenic designer Kerry Moran’s gorgeous yet homely interpretation of Pemberley, and costume designer Megan Hillary’s elegant empire-waist gowns and well-fitted waistcoats. 

Much like its unofficial prequel, Miss Bennet retains Austen’s signature relatability and commentary on marriage and a woman’s place, while also giving audiences new characters to root for.

“There’s a warmth to the whole piece that I really appreciate, especially for this time of year, and I appreciated how it all relates to a lot of the emotions that we feel today,” says Weathersby. “I think that’s a hallmark of Jane Austen’s work—it’s extremely relatable even though it’s a completely different time period with different social rules. I think this play reflects that just as beautifully.”

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Arts Culture

Pick: Accidental Death of an Anarchist

A Maniac wreaks havoc at a police station in Live Arts' Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Supplied photo.

A farce for the force: Italian playwright Dario Fo’s political satire Accidental Death of an Anarchist pokes fun at the Italian police force by imagining a fictionalized aftermath of 1969’s real-life Piazza Fontana bombing. Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist wrongly accused of the bombing, plummets to his death from a fourth-floor window while in a police interrogation room. In the acclaimed play, the Maniac works his way through the police station, confuddling officers with absurd disguises and witticisms until the truth is revealed. Susan E. Evans helms the production—her first directing gig as Live Arts’ artistic director.

Through 6/5. $20-25, times vary. Live Arts, 123 E. Water St. livearts.org

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Arts Culture

Pick: The Children

Live Arts' The Children runs through May 7. Photo: Will Kerner

In a fix: Do we owe future generations a better world than we’re leaving them? The Children, Live Arts’ latest production, explores this real-world question through the lens of three retired nuclear scientists. In a post-nuclear world, Hazel and Robin are trying to live a normal life despite radiation pollution and rationed electricity and water. Their shaky peace is rocked when Rose, a former colleague they haven’t seen in 38 years, reappears, ready to fix what they have created. Tragic yet humorous, The Children is full of surprises and twists that will stay with you.

Through 5/7. $20-25, various times. Live Arts, 123 E. Water St. livearts.org

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Arts Culture

McBride in stride

The Legend of Georgia McBride, Live Arts’ “celebration of divas and difference,” opens on March 4. Photo: Will Kerner

It’d be easy for a bunch of theater-minded folks to say to themselves, “I’m not part of the drag community, but I can put on a play about drag, no problem.”

That would be a trap, though, and one the Live Arts’ production team wants to avoid in its latest play, The Legend of Georgia McBride. The show, which tells the story of an Elvis impersonator who attempts to become a drag queen to make a living, opens at the Water Street theater on March 4.

“The biggest challenge we took on from the get-go was making sure we were stepping into this in an authentic way,” says director Perry Medlin, who’s helmed three shows for Live Arts and many others at Tandem Friends School, where he teaches theater and public speaking. “None of the company has had a great deal of experience in drag, so we wanted to make sure we were coming to this from a place where we were able to learn about what that culture involves and to honor it, not just imitate it.”

Enter Jason Elliott, a former drag queen and current model and public speaker. Live Arts and the Georgia McBride team recruited Elliott as a production consultant, and Medlin says Elliott’s ability to “take that world and put it onstage” has been critical to developing the show’s authenticity.

The Legend of Georgia McBride, written by Matthew Lopez and winner of multiple awards, will be the third show in Live Arts’ current six-play season. The company is trying not only to recover its stage legs post-pandemic, but also integrate a new artistic director’s vision. Susan Evans, who joined Live Arts last June, said presenting inclusive shows with a variety of perspectives would be central to her mission. “More voices need to be heard,” she told C-VILLE in October.

The show will feature five cast members changing in and out of more than 50 costumes. It lines up with the theme of the company’s annual fundraiser—this year, Elliott will host the fundraiser on March 20. Marketer and Design Coordinator Katie Rogers calls it a “big, boozy brunch and live drag show.”

The Legend of Georgia McBride will be the company’s annual mentor/apprentice show, too. Live Arts’s mentor/apprentice program has been giving high school students the chance to participate in community theater for at least a decade, according to Education Director Miller Susen. The program invites students to act as production team apprentices in one mainstage show per year, typically drawing eight to 10 student volunteers and assigning them to areas of their choosing. This year, six high schoolers will apprentice in stage management and scenic, props, lighting, sound, and costume design.

Susen says the mentor/apprentice program has brought countless students back to Live Arts over the years to volunteer on later productions, as well as helping push others on to drama school and even theater careers. That benefits Live Arts, but it’s also good for the theater community in general, according to Susen.

“We have a great group of apprentices on Georgia, and we are delighted to have people finding their way back to Live Arts,” she says. “It’s been a difficult time for theater, so that’s really important.”

What can folks who come to see The Legend of Georgia McBride expect? Medlin calls the show “a huge number with so many moving parts.” In addition to those 50-plus costumes, the production boasts extensive setwork, props, and technical lighting and sound—all great opportunities for those high school apprentices.

“The thing I love about this show is it is this great big drag extravaganza, but at its heart it is a story about somebody who wants to be better and meet the people around them,” Medlin says. “It’s that core of humanity amidst the feathers and the bangles…that make the show interesting for the audience.”

As the five Georgia McBride cast members—Brandon Bolick as the lead, plus Danait Haddish, Marc Schindler, Randy Risher, and Jude Hansen—move around the stage and (hopefully) perform without a hitch, Medlin says it’s important to remember just how many people are working behind the scenes to make it possible.

Oh, and he suggests remembering one more thing: “Don’t forget to tip your drag queens. They get mad when you don’t.”

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Arts Culture

Next act

Live Arts’ new artistic director Susan Evans brings vision and a desire to see the theater evolve to reflect the Charlottesville community. Supplied photo

Susan Evans knows nothing is permanent in the theater. Nor should it be—theaters must evolve to stay relevant, says Live Arts’ artistic director.

“A successful theater is a theater that never stops examining itself,” Evans says. “I think that many theaters get stuck. And it’s easy to get stuck because of money.”

Evans got her own taste of impermanence in August 2020. That’s when she was laid off as artistic director at the Town Hall Theatre Company in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The change put things in perspective for Evans, who’s spent nearly 20 years working in arts direction. “This is my fourth artistic director position—I’m just hoping to get it right,” she says.

Evans’ ouster on the West Coast was outside her control. The Town Hall Theatre told local media outlets the move was driven by budget considerations, and the theater’s leadership praised Evans, noting her “deep artistic vision and theater acumen.”

But budget cuts have, indeed, meant curtains for many community theaters nationwide. According to data from the National Endowment for the Arts, theater, dance, and other performing arts companies lost nearly 60 percent of their employees from March to April 2020. Theaters owning, renting, or leasing space suffered most, with many having to shut their doors.

Theaters in and around Charlottesville struggled like many nationwide. Staunton’s nearly 70-year-old Oak Grove Theater went to a virtual model for 2020 but returned for 2021. Barboursville’s Four County Players has likewise returned to a live season for 2021-22, but Gorilla Theater Productions, which leased a multi-use space on Allied Lane off McIntire Road, announced it was seeking a tenant to take over the facility in July 2020. Bent Theatre, which used Gorilla’s space for improv comedy shows, has moved to virtual productions for the time being.

Anecdotal evidence suggests volunteer organizations like Live Arts and more flexible theaters not tied to leased or rented spaces have had more success than others. The Charlottesville Players Guild, which performs at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, announced that its 2022-23 Black Indigeneity season will include classes and a podcast that follows the production journey. And the Charlottesville Playwrights Collective is producing live plays in the Belmont Arts Collaborative theater on Carlton Road.

For its part, Live Arts stayed afloat with streaming performances and general community outreach. “We reinvented the wheel,” Audience Experience Manager Darryl Smith says.

As Evans sought a new position and Live Arts went through its own pandemic pains, the local theater advertised for a new artistic director. Evans had visited Charlottesville many times—her mother was at the Westminster Canterbury of the Blue Ridge senior living center for 15 years. But in all her visits, she had never heard of Live Arts.

“It was completely new to me, but you can tell a lot about a company just by looking at the kinds of shows being done,” Evans says.

What she saw impressed her. She credits Live Arts for doing, “for lack of a better word, edgier” shows from its inception up to now, and exploring topics that challenge audiences.

In today’s charged political environment—and especially in a place like Charlottesville—Evans says taking on the big issues is more important than ever. At Live Arts, she says she won’t have to rework the theater’s vision. But she does plan to put her stamp on the lineup.

The current season launched on October 15 with Every Brilliant Thing. Directed by Clinton Johnson, the single-actor play digs deep into mental health. The season also addresses LGBTQ+ issues, the environment, and politics; this week’s opening of Pipeline (see story on page 16), by contemporary African American playwright Dominique Morisseau, has been highly anticipated.

“We don’t want it to just be lip service—we have a commitment to talk about LGBTQ and under-resourced communities, and that needs to be expressed in the kind of work we do,” Evans says. “Are you putting on a play with an all-white cast or an all-male cast or an all-cisgendered cast? What stories are being told?”

Evans will direct the season’s final play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, a political farce by Italian Dario Fo that explores police brutality and government overreach. Directing pieces that speak to what’s going on in the community and nation is something Live Arts’ new artistic director plans to continue doing throughout her tenure.

And while Live Arts’ current season has gone well so far, theaters across the country are still struggling with pandemic-related issues. Live Arts will require everyone other than active performers to wear masks in the space, but in some U.S. theaters, unmasked performers have drawn backlash. Live Arts will also ask volunteers and audience members 18 and over to show proof of full vaccination, practice social distancing where possible, and stay home if they are feeling sick or have a recent COVID exposure.

As Live Arts navigates this next act, Evans looks forward to continuing to evolve along with the theater.

“I have grown up with one artistic director model that’s fairly top-down, and I need to expand my own mind and view of diversified leadership,” she says. “More voices need to be heard.”

On stage at Live Arts in 2022

Pipeline
January 14-30, 2022
Written by Dominique Morisseau
Directed by David Vaughn Straughn

The Legend of Georgia McBride
March 4-27, 2022
Written by Matthew Lopez

The Children
April 15-May 7, 2022
Written by Lucy Kirkwood
Directed by Betsy Rudelich Tucker

Accidental Death of an Anarchist
May 20-June 5, 2022
Written by Dario Fo
Directed by Susan Evans

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Arts Culture

Poetry and motion

Pipeline, a new play from Dominique Morriseau, directed by David Vaughn Straughn (right), and starring Aiyana Marcus (left) opens on January 14 at Live Arts. The production will feature a reception for educators on January 22, and an audience talkback on January 27. Photo: Will Kerner

In the early 1960s, African American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks walked past seven boys at a pool hall, an experience she commemorated in the poem “We Real Cool”:

We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We / Strike straight. We / Sing sin. We / Thin gin. We / Jazz June. We / Die soon.

When read aloud, the “we” at the end of each line fades to near-nothingness, a deliberate affectation that Brooks said in a 1970 interview was meant to signify the boys’ questioning of their own existence.

That doubt comes to life in Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline, named for the American “school-to-prison pipeline” that funnels children, especially children of color, from public schools into the criminal justice system. Under the direction of David Vaughn Straughn, the play is being staged at Live Arts from January 14-30.

In her first major role at Live Arts, Aiyana Marcus leads the cast as Nya, a public high school teacher whose efforts to remove her Black son Omari (Asyra Cunningham) from the ominous pipeline seem in vain when he gets into a fight at his predominantly white private school. The conflict starts him down a path that Nya worries will lead him to the doom Brooks predicted in her haunting poem.

“The cast is really great,” says Marcus. “Everyone shows up really ready to work, and really connected to the roles even from our very first reading. I felt that connection with the actor that plays Omari, my son in the show, and everyone seems to have a connection with the language and with their own characters.”

Rounding out the cast are Tanaka Maria, Sarad Davenport, and Jamie Virostko. Brooks’ “We Real Cool” plays such a big role that Marcus considers it “almost a character” in its own right. The poem is woven throughout the production as a haunting backdrop, somewhere between premonition and echo, along with the characters’ struggles.

Nya first brings the poem to the stage when she writes the words on a chalkboard for her students; later, Omari raises the same aching question as the pool players, faltering on the word “we” as he searches for belonging within two types of academic institutions, both of which threaten to fail him.

“It’s a deep process, I think because a lot of us have some sort of proximity or closeness to the characters that we play,” says Marcus. “There’s a certain amount of labor that comes with that. For us, it’s a story, but it’s also a piece of our own lives. It’s not just, ‘Oh, we did this piece of theater;’ it could have, hopefully, very real consequences in our lives and the lives of people who look like us, and can really make a difference.”

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Arts Culture

All fright

Photo: Petr Kratochvil

This month, we asked you to scare us silly with your spookiest horror stories. Here’s the catch: They had to be just two sentences long. Below, we’ve printed the 10 most frightful submissions, which will be performed by the actors at Live Arts. (Look out for the video later this month on our social media.) Read on—if you dare.  

First place: Robert tenderly kissed the palm of Jennifer’s small, delicate hand. Then he turned to hang it on his Christmas tree with the others. Judith Dianne Anderson 

As satisfying as it was to push him drunk and dazed off the cliff,
she found even greater delight when she climbed down to look at his corpse. Who knew that carrion beetles could be so tasty? Anne Olsson Loebs

When he first awoke to complete darkness and utter silence, and was unable to move any part of his body in any direction, he thought maybe he was dead. Then, as he felt hundreds of tiny little insect feet crawling all over his body and into his ears and eyes and nose, biting and stinging as they ran into his mouth and down his throat when he screamed, he wished he was. Mark Ehlers

Desperately this deformed, unsightly creature stares back at me, armed with eyes that have seen 1,000 lost worlds and shrieking silent howls that carry enough horror to crush any mortal soul, casting its agony upon those who dare see or hear it. I hate my mirror. Michael Urpi

The dinner was a cheery one, with all the guests smiling brightly.
But the only noise was that of the host’s scraping steak knife, stained a deep maroon, and the buzz of flies circling the guest’s forgotten faces. Rose O’Shea

She holds her husband’s hand every night while watching the local news. He’s been dead for 10 years, but she doesn’t mind his boney grip between her fingers. Kathleen Richard

I started picking up speed through a haunted corn maze on Halloween when a man started chasing me. Then I thought to myself, fake chainsaws don’t usually have the chains on them. Chloe Root

It’s so good to have a mask mandate on campus. My peers would finally assume that everyone has a mouth. Hans Bai

My ex mistress keeps visiting me throughout the day, and I don’t want my wife to find out about her. Maybe I shouldn’t have buried her in the backyard. Brenna Kidd-Bania

The eerie quiet of midnight coated the Downtown Mall, except for a plump rat that nibbled gleefully on a half-eaten Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Suddenly, a crescendoing shriek pierced the silence, and the feasting rat jerked his gaze upward to see a ghost rising above the rubble of the Landmark Hotel and chanting: “Build me, build me.” Matt Deegan

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Arts Culture

Pick: Every Brilliant Thing

Directed by Clinton Johnston, Every Brilliant Thing is deeply touching and laugh-out-loud funny. Photo: Eze Amos

Center stage: Live Arts welcomes audiences back inside the theater with Every Brilliant Thing, a story about depression that’s both deeply touching and laugh-out-loud funny. After his mother attempts suicide, a 7-year-old boy writes her a list of all the things that make life worth living, from ice cream to Kung Fu movies. As he grows up and faces his own struggles, the list takes on another level of importance in his own life. Directed by Clinton Johnston and starring Chris Estey, Liz Howard, and Ray Nedzel, the play’s emphasis on audience interaction means that no two performances are the same.

Through 11/7. $20-25, times vary. Live Arts, 123 E. Water St., livearts.org. See COVID restrictions on the website.