The play, part of the Marginal Arts Festival, is a random series of events in a woman’s troubled love life.

Samantha Macher, a master’s of fine arts playwright at Hollins University and the playwright-in-residence at the SkyPilot Theatre in Los Angeles, takes her main character, Elin, on a chaotic ride through romance, from adolescence to college to adulthood, back and then forward again.

The disconnected string of events revolves around the immature but incurably romantic woman; at times comedic, at times poetic, but perpetually moving, Elin’s world is a blur of personal relationships that always seem to fall short of her expectations.

Susanna Young is Elin, an American woman of Swedish heritage with a passion for love, coffee and Swedish pancakes with lingonberry butter (the promised recipe for the pancakes is in the playbill, so be sure to get one at the door). The play has minimal staging — only a table, a bench and two chairs — and there are no props, so all the action relies the pantomime skills of Young and her two cast mates and the deft descriptions of the narrator.

Chad Runyon plays Elin’s emotionally vapid husband; Drew Dowdy plays her many boyfriends, her lone girlfriend, and a couple of baristas; Todd Ristau narrates. Shay Mullins provides musical accompaniment with a ukulele.

The actors do a splendid job of illustrating Elin’s entanglements. Young plays the part with the perfect mix of dramatic flair and comedic timing and reminds me, in appearance and talent, of actress Elisabeth Moss of television’s “The West Wing” and “Mad Men.”

Dowdy, an experienced local actor, is superb in his multiple roles that include men — Elin’s worthless high school boyfriend, her college crushes and an unavailable artist she lusts for — and women — Elin’s lesbian girlfriend as well as an American and a Swedish barista.

Runyon brings the right amount of chilly reserve to his role as Elin’s husband, and Ristau, dressed to match the lead character, keeps the story moving as Elin’s alter ego, the narrator.

Director Bob Moss’ pacing and Macher’s fresh dialogue draw the audience into Elin’s dysfunction. Ristau, as the omnipotent narrator, explains the transitions and adds a sense of time and context, so the randomness of the episodes, which could have easily digressed into chaos, flows smoothly into a coherent story.

While the play deals with serious topics of love, respect and trust, it is also funny — although I admit the part where I laughed the most occurred while Young is conversing in Swedish with Dowdy, because their accents reminded me of my favorite Muppet. Adult language and themes should be considered if parents want to bring young children to the remaining three performances.

“Bellocq’s Ophelia”

Photos come to life in the Hollins Theatre production of “Bellocq’s Ophelia,” a play based on a collection of poems by Hollins alum and Pulitzer Prize-winner Natasha Trethewey. The play is also a feature of this year’s Marginal Arts Festival, which kicked off Thursday.

Trethewey’s lyrical prose was adapted for the stage by Ernest Zulia, T.J. Anderson and Lexi Mondot. The play is set in New Orleans’ Storyville, the city’s infamous legalized red light district.

At the beginning of the last century, Creole photographer E.J. Bellocq had a favorite muse, a woman Trethewey names Ophelia. The gaze of this biracial woman, beautiful and demure yet strong and confident, staring from the aging photos, inspired Trethewey to create an achingly tender and disturbing and sensual tale of survival and the dignity of women, particularly for women of color, despite their lack of social status.

The story is told through a series of journal entries and letters from Ophelia to her friend and teacher, Constance. Dance and music, jazz, blues and Southern spiritual gospel, and video — including projections of Trethewey’s poetry and Bellocq’s (pronounced Bell-lock) photographs — support the cast.

Sarah Ingel plays Ophelia, an educated daughter of a white man and a black woman, who came to New Orleans from Mississippi seeking honest work and a better life. Faced with no job opportunities (“No one needs a girl,” she hears repeatedly) and possible homelessness, she is taken in by Countess P (Lisa Gabourel), a kindly madam running an upscale brothel that features “black women in white skin.”

Ophelia writes home, shares what stories she can about her life — there are some “desires I cannot commit to paper” — and sends money to her mother, played by Helena Brown.

When she becomes the muse of the photographer, she begins to envision a new life — one of “freedom of memory; of the white space of forgetting” what she has had to do to survive. She becomes an apprentice photographer, buying a Kodak with her savings, and finds an artistic outlet and a measure of freedom behind the lens.

Adult themes and images are handled tastefully. The 90-minute production is thrilling, heartbreaking and thought-provoking. The synergy of music, dance and poetry is captivating and the performances are memorable.

by Hart Fowler on February 2011 in feature,general with your comment

Story behind Simon Nolen’s cover image and Brian Counihan answers: What is marginal art?

What is marginal art? It is any activity that brings people together in an atmosphere of fun and civic pride. It can be the absurd, the audacious, the ludicrous — art that is laconic, sublime and serene — vision that sees beyond the expected into the extremes, creation that steps beyond the perimeters of traditional aesthetics and canon. For the fourth year, Roanoke is celebrating those marginal arts in a festival originated by Community High School’s faculty of artists and scholars, and made possible by grassroots community involvement at every stage.

Of course we welcome funny walks, ex-parrots, deadpan wit and rubber chickens of all sorts. Like the Monty Pythons, Fluxists and Dadaists before us, this festival draws upon art historical movements as well as contemporary art ideas to offer a fun, engaged and educational experience for every age, timed to take place in the cold humdrum of winter. The festival crams a miraculous number of events and exhibitions into six full days of Mardi-Gras carnival “buzz” designed to replicate the high cultural energy of any major city.

The marginal reaches way past the mainstream arts and cultural offerings to give something extra, something different, to encourage cultural tourism. Art can be so much more than commercial products, entertainment and decoration. It is about action, transformation and discovery. It should offer healing and give a sense of purpose to those who feel overlooked. It should be affordable and accessible to all. It is about making our whole community better.

Marginal art is different. It is what gets left out or overlooked from the “ordinary” cultural scene because it is weird, complicated or unprofitable. It is different in the way it builds partnerships throughout the region through collaborations, and different because it provides affordable, inclusive and accessible events to the community. It is especially different because it views local culture through a global lens, sometimes absurd, sometimes rebellious, always thought-provoking and boundary-breaking.

Brian Counihan

———– Story behind the Cover

Brian Counihan and I tend to throw jokes at each other — it’s how we tend to brainstorm. Every once in a while something sticks in my head and I can’t get rid of it. That’s generally when I know something is right. I believe Brian said something about chickens and doughnuts during one of those joke/brainstorms, and I saw a huge chance to play. I took my family out to buy a rubber chicken, and then brought it to school to show our students how I work. The “night sky” and the “egg stars” are images I found hilarious and aesthetically pleasing. As for the Marginal Arts Festival box with star and fig leaves — well, I like overt imagery. -Simon Nolen

Sign up for the event at http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/events/147332568711589/

What do you like talk about, and never get the opportunity? In what do you find fascination which you wish to convey to others? What do you have to show us? To teach? To introduce? Come share it at the Marginal Arts Festival! The Festival runs from Feb. 16-21, 2012. Star… City Shadow School will be coordinating a series short talks, demonstrations, micro-lectures, workshops, show-and-tells, and whatever else YOU can come up with. Presentations will be taking place in several venues throughout the festival, in collaboration with other community projects. Subject and form are up to you: the more variety the better! This is an opportunity for us all to discover knowledge, resources, interests, resources and possibilities that lie hidden within our community–sowing seeds which we can cultivate over the following months and years. Presentations will be given and attended by visiting artists from our various extended communities as well, and will be one more platform for building dialogues and networks of friendship between Roanoke and other communities worldwide. If you have something to share, contact starcityshadowschool@gmail.com and/or contact us through this page. It needn’t be ambitious–most presentations should be a half-hour or less, and can be as formal or informal as you please, on any topic. If you’d like to present something longer, let us know and we’ll see what we can arrange. If you’d like to be a part of this, please let us know by January 27; at that time we’ll work with everybody to assemble a schedule and have a programme with times and locations ready to distribute before the Festival begins.

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The Star City Shadow School aims to facilitate and build experiences of collective learning founded in the diverse grassroots communities of the New River Valley. We intend to develop a framework for the non-profit exchange of information, skills, and perspectives accessible to anyone regardless of class, age, or previous education. Like its participants and its subject matter, the school’s locations will be diverse and integrated with the community–from informal meetings at homes and public spaces to lectures and workshops hosted by venues and organizations already helping to define and expand the cultural life of Roanoke and the surrounding region. While the need for such projects seems particularly keen in the current economic climate, and particularly in the face of increasingly restrictive and commercially-directed guidelines for the funding of educational institutions, the Shadow School’s mandate more broadly addresses both the form and the content of what education means in our society, reclaiming the control and circulation of knowledge from the grip of state and corporate power. This involves not only the exchange of knowledge but also the nurturing of grassroots communities.

 

 

Toward this end, the Shadow School hopes to help forge networks across a broad array of the intersecting communities already addressing and supporting various aspects of civic and cultural life, and foster greater communication and collaboration between them. It will also involve partnering in a number of ways with existing institutions, when those institutions can be seen to play a positive role in Roanoke but are unable to encompass certain forms of knowledge or pedagogical models. In this way communities served by these official institutions have access to educational experiences impossible within that context, while also engaging in direct and non-hierarchical ways with a more diverse group of people rooted in the city itself. The educational models explored will range from structured classes and formal lectures by visiting or local speakers to informal discussion groups and events attempting to explore the intersections of pedagogy with leisure, conversation, and play. In this way, we hope to encourage the sharing of pockets of vital skills and information that exist, but are not yet fully utilised or explored, within the region.

 

The Shadow School will be cross-disciplinary and non-hierarchical; when fully established, classes will be proposed, taught, and attended by any member of the community with something to share. An instructor or lecturer in one class will be a student in another. Some activities will not correspond to the teacher-student dichotomy, or will re-imagine the ways in which this relationship might take shape.  The pilot committee or administrative board is intended to discover and establish a workable structure for the school, to organise and co-ordinate the school’s activities, and maintain its day-to-day infrastructural needs. Rather than constituting a centralised dispenser or regulator of knowledge, we intend to act as facilitators and co-ordinators, a forum for the exchange of communal resources and a circuit for the circulation of information. Beyond the curriculum itself, this goal will be further pursued through the maintenance and expansion of resources online which will provide not only a database of current and past classes, but freely accessible teaching materials for past, present, future, and potential classes, thus encouraging the possibilities for self-guided learning projects, and the exchange of resources with similar projects and individuals nationally and internationally.

 

Star City Shadow School sets itself the task of re-integrating education with everyday life, and situating it within the nexus of personal relationships and civic responsibility. This does not require the exchange of money, the regulation of teaching and learning, or ownership of facilities and resources. It simply calls for the focusing and activation of the collective experience, curiosity, generosity, and imagination already in the process of transforming our community