Tag: Performing Arts

Young and restless

Is there a more conflicted time in a person’s life than her 16th year? Sure, there’s the residual joy and naiveté of youth, but there’s also the looming specter of adulthood with car and job responsibilities piling up, and anxiety-inducing acne issues. And that’s not even mentioning all the baseline drama to which teenagers are so naturally inclined. Sixteen in Ten Minutes or Less takes you back to those tumultuous times with a series of 10 minute plays intertwining the lives and complications of a group of teenagers dealing with everything from bullies to braces.

Through 2/17 $12, 8pm. Four County Players, 5256 Governor Barbour St., Barboursville. (540) 832-5355.

Fundamentals of funny

Live comedy’s a tough occupation, and can be even tougher if your aim is keeping it clean. Rising to the occasion is Akintunde, whose goal to revolutionize the Christian entertainment industry results in a stand-up routine carefully balanced between edgy and family-friendly. The veteran writer, actor, producer, and stand-up comedian draws from his experience writing for TV on programs like “It’s Showtime at the Apollo,” and “The Monique Show,” and is currently promoting the release of a new DVD.

Saturday 1/26 $10-15, 7:30pm. V. Earl Dickinson Main Stage, PVCC Campus, 501 College Dr. 961-5376.

“My third year, when I was directing, I ate nothing but M&Ms and drank nothing but apple cider,” said Jigsaw Jones, raising his eyebrows. “Between twelve hours of directing and drinking during both performances—well, I got kidney stones.”

The playwright and actor laughs. Sleeplessness, sweat, and the odd kidney stone sound par for the course during 24/7, a 24-hour theater festival in which seven ten-minute plays are written, rehearsed, and performed twice for live audiences in Charlottesville. Hosted by Whole Theater and benefitting Live Arts, this year’s show opens on January 19, and closes the same night. Fifty-eight volunteers have committed their talents to the artistic unknown, bound to create fearlessly—or at least fast.

“I was somewhat terrified,” said Ed Warwick, an actor who, prior to his 2012 role as a 24/7 playwright, had never written a play before. ”My fiancé told me, ‘Ray [Nedzel, the show’s founder and artistic director] wouldn’t ask you to do this if he didn’t think you could do this very well. You’re being set up for success, not for failure.’ And he was right.”

As Warwick discovered, Nedzel and his behind-the-scenes team are experts. “We have everything down to a science,” said Kristen Wegner, stage manager since the festival’s inception five years ago. “Every fifteen minutes of the day is scheduled.”

Writers clock in at 7pm on Friday, a theme for the festival is randomly selected, and each playwright pulls unique cast requirements and one inspirational word out of a hat. These parameters—and a 6am deadline—give structure to the hours that follow.

24/7 writer and actor Mendy St. Ours gets it. “Your rhythms get out of whack and you have a firm deadline: two elements that can actually push a writer to get something done. At some point you just surrender and become a delirious cypher.”

At 8am, directors arrive and choose a freshly printed script from a hat. “When I have 6-8 weeks to open a show, I spend time up front collaborating with actors and designers on staging and story,” said Marianne Kubrik, a 24/7 director and Associate Professor of Drama at UVA. “With 24/7 we’ve got 8 hours, so I’ve got to make smart directing decisions fast.”

Actors arrive at 8:30am to be randomly assigned to directors. As they race to learn lines, a whirlwind crew conjures lighting, costumes, sound, and props. “I have 25 minutes to get the play cued up,” explained Heather Hutton, a four-time lighting designer. “I keep the plot simple, but with enough color to vary the look quickly.”

Like most participants, Hutton said 24/7 is her favorite theater event of the year. (Audiences agree; tickets tend to sell out quickly.) Of all her favorite moments, a singing six-year-old beauty queen, a nun in a trunk, and “Chris Baumer in girl clothes, every year.” Hutton said she loves the risk of it most. “No one is allowed to get too precious, everyone is expected to deliver, and the audience is included in this nearly impossible task. It’s a steamroller of fun and mayhem.”

Warwick agreed. Along with fiancé Gary White, he will lead a new group for 2013: the House Band. In 24 hours, this group of musicians will choose instruments and write new songs to perform at curtain call and intermission. “I remember being amazed as an audience member that what I was hearing was written last night,” Warwick said. “But now that I’ve written a piece, I’m amazed by all of it.”

Jones echoed his amazement. “I wrote the first musical in 24/7 history, and when I showed up bleary-eyed for the random casting, two of the four people drawn from the hat were musicians. And actors. And the right gender. That’s the thing about 24/7—for the last four years I’ve watched improbable shows get cast perfectly.”

St. Ours felt it too. “There’s something magic about a body of work writing itself, manifesting itself, and then disappearing within 24 hours. It’s a wacky sand mandala.”

After five years, Nedzel has an idea of where such magic comes from. “24/7 flips the paradigm,” he said, noting that actors and writers typically audition and submit works to critical producers. 24/7 guarantees that new work will be produced, that actors will land their roles. The artists, in turn, commit completely, “and they do it with conviction, guts and expertise each time.”

“Trusting the artist is a winning idea,” he said. “Given the opportunity to shine, people will always go the extra mile.”

The result is ephemeral, incredible theater. Rarely kidney stones.

24/7 2013 Live Arts January 19

Scarlet script

The Country Wife is filthy. So filthy, in fact, that it was banned from the stage for 171 years, so it’s obviously awesome. William Wycherley’s Restoration farce offers a plethora of lewd puns, lascivious innuendo, and outright ribaldry in a classically structured, three-fold plot as it plays out the stories of rakish Harry Horner and his ambitious plans to bed as many of London’s finest ladies as possible with a devious angle, the sexual re-education of naïve Margery Pinchwife, and its notable effects on her ho-hum marriage and humdrum friends.

Friday 1/18 through 4/7 Pay what you will, 7:30pm. Blackfriars Playhouse at American Shakespeare Center, 10 S. Market St., Staunton. (540) 851-1733.

Stanley Ann Dunham falls in love and marries a Kenyan student in the early ’60s. She struggles through a second marriage to a corrupt civil servant in Indonesia, and comes through it to work in anthropology and assist poverty-stricken women in third world countries. All the while she is raising the 44th President of the United States. The one-woman show Stanley Ann is a globe-trotting tale that sheds light on the formative years of Barack Obama, examining the life and surprising impact of his mother, a would-be scientist from Kansas.

Thursday-Saturday 10/25-27 $10, 8pm. The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, 209 Monticello Rd. 984-5669.

Make friend with the play: Stanley Ann

Taking the reins of an institution with deep community roots requires chutzpa, maybe even a little swagger, and in such situations, it is my understanding that the prevailing wisdom is to go big or go home. It does not appear that Live Arts’ new artistic director, Julie Hamberg, is headed home any time soon.

Hamberg chose to open the theater’s 22nd season with Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park, winner of a Pulitzer and a Tony for best play, among other notable credits. The play premiered just two years ago at Playwrights Horizons, and the Live Arts production is not only the Virginia premiere, but also the world premiere in an amateur theater.

The script is inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, adding a kind of prequel and sequel to a classic American tale of black/white integration. The action unfolds in two parallel moments 50 years apart, in 1959 and 2009, and centers on a house that becomes the focus of racial tension in Raisin.

The first act follows a white family moving out of the house in what was the predominantly white Chicago neighborhood of Clybourne Park. Across the intervening years between the first and second act, Clybourne Park becomes a black neighborhood, and the second half of the play deals with a white family moving back in, potentially gentrifying the neighborhood. The play has been regularly dubbed a “post-racial farce.”

Bruce Norris is an actor with some pretty respectable credits, and he’s written Clybourne Park to have the hell acted out of it. Each character has a meaty agenda, and they all rub against one another in provocative and unsettling ways. Much fuss is made in the first act over a chafing dish, and chafing is the right word. Nobody’s perfect, there are no heroes or villains, it’s just different kinds of people having a lot of trouble figuring out how to get along with each other.

The real treat, though, is the dialogue. The writing absolutely demands that attention be paid to pace and timing, with its overlapping repartee and steadily ratcheting tension levels. Pace and timing are the foundation of a play’s verisimilitude, the tools that lull an audience into an immersive investment in the life of the play, applied as a nearly indecipherable understanding between director, ensemble, and text. In the case of Clybourne Park, I felt transported.

Every actor plays two parts, one in each act. Chris Patrick delivers a standout performance as Karl and Steve. He plays a Karl confident in his beliefs and firm in his decisions, without any of the apologetic self-awareness some might bring to the role, and his Steve is clearly a man confronted by a bewildering level of hypocrisy and passive-aggression. Patrick hits his beats hard, lands his actions, and fills his disagreeable characters with humanity. This is an ensemble production to its core, though, and the credit for its success must reside with the whole team, with the way the actors knit together to form a believable whole out of a chopped up set of realities.

Ray Nedzel’s Russ is a man ripped free from the trappings of giving a damn, and his wry, self-effacing delivery sets up a moving arc as he portrays a basically good person pushed over the line. His Dan is huge, maybe just a hair too much, but forgivable in that he made me belly laugh. Barbara Roberts’ Bev is huggably sweet, and her brittleness and growing desperation contribute to a generous amount of the dramatic tension. Her Kathy is delivered with a well-tempered balance of confidence and righteous indignation. Brandon Lee’s Albert is the kind of person to which you pay immediate attention because you get the feeling he knows more than he’s letting on, and his Kevin was both confrontational and yet grudgingly likeable.

As a final note, I witnessed something on opening night that most likely will not happen on any other night. About 10 minutes into the second act, the lights came up briefly and Executive Director Matt Joslyn announced that one of the actors needed to leave the stage and would be replaced by the assistant stage manager, Jovi Richards, script in hand. Firstly, big kudos to Ms. Richards, who stepped in out of nowhere, and out of costume, and not only held her own but made a solid contribution, even falling neatly into the pace of the show. But more so, I’m reminded of something Julie Hamberg stressed in the season announcement a few months ago: the theater’s commitment to the community.

During the opening night of the opening show of the opening season of a new artistic director, the entire performance was put on hold so that an actor could address a personal emergency. Of course, it’s the decent thing to do, but you might be surprised at how impersonal some professional theaters can be. Live Arts is a community theater, committed to community-based values, and what I took from the vocal outpouring of support from the audience in response, is the authenticity of that value.

Barboursville’s eminent regional theater, Four County Players, is celebrating four solid decades of musicals, contemporaries, classics, 10-minute festivals, and all the various and delightful manifestations of staged drama with a one-weekend-only celebratory blowout, 40 and Fabulous. They’re bringing in some local heavy hitters to re-live the thrills in a musical revue: Jane Scatena, Joncey Boggs, and Geri Carlson Sauls all have a hand in putting together the tribute.

Through 10/14 $15-40, 8pm. Four County Players, 5256 Governor Barbour St., Barboursville. (540) 832-5355.

Eugène Ionesco lived in France as World War II broke out. In the heart of Europe, he was able to observe firsthand the virtually unchecked spread of Fascism and Nazism among a seemingly reasonable population, and this sudden transformation had a deep effect on him. A generation of European artists saw the same, and from the inexplicable carnage of the last great war, the Absurdists explored the new boundary lines set by man’s ability to be senseless and cruel on a large scale. To open its season, UVA’s drama department stages Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a bizarre and poignant metaphor of those chaotic times.

Through 10/13 $8-14, 8pm. UVA’s Helms Theater, 109 Culbreth Rd. 924-3326.

Roscoe B is a decidedly forthright individual with an artisanal approach to telling it like it is. The Richmond native, born Douglas Powell and self-anointed Roscoe Burnems, looms as a local spoken-word giant, crushing open mic nights and blowing up poetry slams around the area for the last three years. As a card-carrying member of Slam Richmond, he aided his hometown team in landing an impressive top 10 spot at this year’s National Poetry Slam. The hip-hop inspired wordsmith gets things off his chest as part of the Verbs & Vibes series.

Thursday 10/4 $5, 7pm. Para Coffee, 19 Elliewood Ave. 293-4412.