Copious Notes

The University of Kentucky Theatre presents the final weekend of Andrew Kimbrough’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” which will offer a new spin on how you view Guignol Theatre productions. Literally, Tony Hardin’s set faces the back stage of the Guignol with three rows of seats along the back wall. The primary set consists of an living room where Nora Helmer (Alys Dickerson) watches her idyllic world fall apart in what is widely considered the first feminist play. The set, which includes a jagged wall to peek into the office of Nora’s husband Torvald’s (Chris Floyd) office and an exterior wall that flies in for some scenes and a trapdoor staircase through which characters enter and exit. Nelson Fields costumes complete the Victorian look in the production that also stars Brian Sprague as Nils Krogstad, Abby Sheridan as Kristine Linde and Jeremy Gillett as Dr. Rank.

Audiences packed the Meadow View Barn at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill for last years Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.

• Check out our audio slide show from As It Is In Heaven.

Shaker Village of ­Pleasant Hill doesn’t necessarily need music.

The lush, green grounds of the community are a sustained pianissimo passage, frequently augmented by the songs of birds, whistling of the wind and rhythm of rippling water.

Leave your iPod behind.

But that does not mean that music cannot enhance the Pleasant Hill experience.

As Rachel in "As It Is in Heaven," Erica Solitaire Chappell sings in Pleasant Hill’s Meadow View Barn.

The Shakers, after all, are known for their songs - Simple Gifts, anyone? The University of Kentucky Theatre has been bringing some of those tunes to the stage of the Meadow View Barn the past two weekends with its ­production of Arlene Hutton’s As It Is In Heaven.

That production, which has its final performances today through Sunday afternoon, begins and ends with the women of the play ­strolling through the field adjacent to the barn raising songs to the tops of the trees.

The music does not stop there, though.

Next weekend brings the third annual Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, and if you are trying to come up with a more perfect ­marriage of music and venue in ­Kentucky, you have some work to do.

We tend to think of ­classical music as something to seal in a perfectly quiet concert hall, supposing that one obscured note would obliterate an entire work. Of course, perfect silence is rarely achievable in a hall full of people, with walls that aren’t impervious to honking horns and sirens.

Yes, Meadow View Barn is susceptible to the sounds of its environment, but a violin mixes so much better with a bird or a breeze than a candy wrapper or screeching tires.

At last year's Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass, the lineup included the Orion String Quartet, featuring sibling violinists Todd and Daniel Phillips.

In the natural setting, at last year’s festival, the music seemed to open, with the instruments so close to their source materials.

And these are musicians to make the most of the environs.

All three years of the ­festival, the Norton Center for the Arts at Danville’s ­Centre College has engaged the Chamber Music ­Society of Lincoln Center to ­oversee its artistic direction. ­Pianist Wu Han has been the constant, and this year she brings ­violinist Erin Keefe, cellist Fred Sherry and ­clarinetist David Shifrin. If you pay attention to classical music, each is an ­internationally known practitioner of his or her instrument.

For the second year, the festival has engaged a second group, this time the Escher String Quartet, to play in its own right and mix with the Lincoln Center musicians in the festival’s four concerts.

Those combinations, like Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E Flat Major for Piano, Two Violins, Viola and Cello, scheduled for next Sunday night, are the real treats of the event.

The morning sessions, in the village’s ­Meetinghouse, focus on Ludwig van Beethoven on Saturday and J.S. Bach on Sunday. The evenings include music of Beethoven, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy.

Debussy and nature? — makes sense.
As does trying to take the arts out to environments such as Pleasant Hill.

So often we try to hype the natural beauty of the ­Bluegrass, but then when it comes to presenting the beauty of the arts, we retreat to the city like everywhere else.

The Heaven performances, chamber music festival and other outdoor events show an arts community trying to get more in tune with our ­surroundings.

HARRODSBURG — For the second consecutive spring the University of Kentucky Theatre is presenting Arlene Hutton’s As It Is In Heaven at the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill. The play is set in the village in 1838, at a time known as the “Era of Manifestations,” when many Shakers were experiencing visions and receiving spiritual gifts. The play by Hutton, whose family hails from Corbin, examines jealousies that arise when members of the Pleasant Hill group start experiencing these visions and gifts.

This is director Rhoda-Gale Pollack’s third time directing Hutton’s play, which is being presented in a tobacco barn that was renovated for the Chamber Music Festival of the Bluegrass. The UK production runs May 15-24, 2009.

Here’s our slide show of the University of Kentucky Theatre’s production of The African Company presents Richard III. Mouse over the bottom to get controls. Click on the little comment cloud to the left to activate captions. If you click on a photo, it will take you to a larger version of it at Picasa, and you can click the link at the bottom left for a larger version of the whole show.

Emannuel Thurman sits on the stage of the Briggs Theatre in the University of Kentucky Fine Arts Building and starts to perform the great speech from Act I, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent,” he says. “Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house ….”

But then he veers into a monologue recalling some of the glorious and not so glorious moments of his actual character, James Hewlett, a black Shakespearean actor in early 19th-century America.

Hewlett’s monologue in Carlyle Brown’s The African Company Presents Richard III recalls how it was difficult to be taken seriously as an African-American actor back then. But the play, being presented this week by UK Theatre, also illuminates a time when black actors were taken very seriously — seriously enough to be seen as a threat by the white establishment in New York theater.

For the play’s director and cast, it was a little-known part of black history until they picked up Brown’s script, based on a true story.

“It’s 1821,” director Sidney Shaw says. “This is way before the Civil War, way before the Emancipation Proclamation. So these Negroes during this play are free, and we don’t know a lot about free Negroes prior to the Civil War. You assume they were all in slavery, and of course, these people are not. They’re doing theater.”

They’re also asserting African-American culture very early in U.S. history, making white theaters nervous. One of the central conflicts of the play is the efforts of Stephen Price, a New York impresario, to shut down the African Company’s production of Richard III because it presents a strong challenge to his own production, even among white theatergoers.

“There’s this culture war going on about what is this country going to be?” Shaw says. “Stephen Price thinks it’s his prerogative, and Billy Brown (owner of the African Company) thinks, ‘We’ve got a point of view about this. Why can’t we present it?’

“So there’s this clash of cultures, clash of ideas and clash over who has the right to do Shakespeare.”

This might be theater, but the student actors in the show say they are learning a lot of history from Brown’s script.

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Zach Moseley as Tom Joad and Jeremy Gillett as Jim Casey in the University of Kentucky and Bluegrass Community and Technical College theater programs' production of Frank Galati's "The Grapes of Wrath." Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

Click the play button to hear part of our interview with Zach Moseley and Jeremy Gillett.

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

After starting their acting careers in the theater program at Bluegrass Community and Technical College, Zach Moseley and Jeremy Gillett moved up to the University of Kentucky.

But don’t expect them to call being in a BCTC production a comedown.

“I love working with Tim,” Gillett says of BCTC theater director Tim X. Davis, who is directing UK and BCTC’s co-production of The Grapes of Wrath. “He introduced me to theater, and it’s good to be working with him again.”

Zach Moseley as Tom Joad.

Moseley, who plays Tom Joad in the production based on John Steinbeck’s novel, says he was “interested to see how my old friends from BCTC and new friends from UK would blend together. I was surprised how quickly they came together.”

That sentiment extends to the top of both theater programs.

Davis and UK theater department chairwoman Nancy Jones describe the decision to partner as a simple exchange of e-mail saying, “Hey, let’s work together.”

“I had always thought it would be great to bring Tim in as a guest artist,” Jones says. “We talked first about partnering in general and then Grapes of Wrath specifically.”

Grapes was a show that UK Theatre had wanted to produce for a while. Lighting-design professor John Holloway was a big proponent of it because of the design possibilities it presented. It just happens that the play — adapted by Frank Galati from the novel about a Depression-era family traveling across the country to find work in the fields of California — turned out to be really timely.

“It is certainly not a happy accident,” Davis says. “We wish we were not going through these tough economic times. But it has been interesting to look at the parallels between now and back then.”

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Allyson Smith as Ma and Zach Moseley as Tom Joad in the University of Kentucky and Bluegrass Community and Technical College theater programs' production of "The Grapes of Wrath." Photo by Rich Copley | LexGo.

Friday morning, NPR’s Morning Edition featured a report about how migrant workers in the United States who had moved up from working in the fields to coveted construction jobs are now having to head back to agricultural work because the building boom has gone bust.

The report ended saying, “But for now, older so-called domestic farm workers and former construction workers will take the jobs — unless things get so bad that U.S. citizens are willing to move across the country for five months’ work in these lettuce fields at $350 a week.”

Friday night, I settled into a seat at the Guignol Theatre to watch a play about U.S. citizens willingly traveling across the country to work the fields for much, much less.

This week, the University of Kentucky and Bluegrass Community and Technical College theater programs opened a joint production of the Depression epic The Grapes of Wrath, which runs through March 1, and no one can accuse them of presenting escapist entertainment.

The Grapes of Wrath is tough to watch or read at any time. A big part of the story’s greatness is how John Steinbeck chronicled some of the worst elements of the Great Depression in aching detail: a family of 12 traveling cross country in an barely road-worthy truck, losing people along the way to death and despair. In the promised land of California, they find thousands more like themselves all at the mercy of bully farm owners and policemen.

You think, “There but for the grace . . . ” and then remember that for the past several months the unemployment rolls have grown in the high-hundreds of thousands monthly, the stock market keeps finding new lows and we keep hearing we’re in the worst economic crisis since — ugh — the Great Depression.

UK and BCTC of course did not plan to be this timely. They aimed to stage an ambitious production with a cast of more than two dozen, some impressive set pieces, and cool video elements. And they planned it when $4 gas was draining our wallets, but we were still months away from the banking collapses of the fall.

Now, Frank Galati’s stage adaptation of Grapes is almost too timely as a vivid portrait of a time we keep hearing about when we turn on the news.

Maybe we need to see this. But maybe what we need most are these words from Ma (played by Allyson Smith), late in the second act: “Don’t you go frettin’. A different time’s coming.”