You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream for

Posted by Bruce Miller

It was a dark and stormy night, on stage and in the “real world,” as we kicked off the fall season at Barksdale Hanover Tavern with tonight’s opening of Deathtrap by Ira Levin. After directing last fall’s successful production of Agatha Christie’s whodunnit, The Mousetrap, John Moon returned to direct this fall’s thriller, Deathtrap. He's done a terrific job. We’ve yet to decide which trap will be used to ensnare John’s services for next season.

Screams and laughs accompanied all the flashes of lightning and claps of thunder as John’s talented cast kept things edgy until the final curtain. Michael Goodwin made a terrific Barksdale debut in the leading role of has-been playwright Sydney Bruhl. One of our nation’s finest actors, Mike has built a stellar career at Seattle Rep, the Guthrie in Minneapolis, Arena Stage in D. C., the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, the Long Wharf in New Haven, and the New York Shakespeare Festival under Joseph Papp. Broadway credits include A Patriot for Me, Cyrano, Ambassador, and a revival of Charley’s Aunt. TV credits include recurring roles on Dynasty, Falcon Crest, St. Elsewhere, McGyver and Matlock, among many others.

Christopher Evans returned from New York to rejoin his Barksdale family in the role of novice playwright Clifford Anderson. Chris appeared with us before in The Full Monty, Melissa Arctic, Fifth of July, and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. He even filled in for a week in the lead role of Paul Bratter in last year’s Barefoot in the Park.

Robin Arthur, Jacqueline Jones and ‘Rick Gray round out the cast of potential murderers and/or murderees. Robin is well remembered at Willow Lawn for her role as Vera Charles in Mame, and she counts among her Hanover Tavern credits everything from Nunsense to Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. Jackie starred in Das Barbecu, the last show before the start of Barksdale’s ten-year hiatus from the Tavern in 1996, and Over the River and Through the Woods, one of the shows in the first season back at the Tavern in 2006. ‘Rick makes a point to come play with us every six years or so, having last appeared at Barksdale in my 2001 production of The Little Foxes at Willow Lawn.

Sharing in the Opening Night festivities were Barksdale Board members Rick Arenstein and Kevin Kilgore, and longtime supporters Roy Burgess and Ed Ramsey. Steve Moore and Derek Phipps, two of the poker playing pals from The Odd Couple, came back to experience life on the other side of the footlights. Chase Kniffen and his mom, Bev Kniffen, were overheard making book during intermission as to who on stage was and who wasn’t who or what they seemed to be. Brad Tuggle, our able stage manager, and Alex Whiteway, his weapon wielding assistant, hovered over the food tables at the post-show party, glad that their responsibilities had gone off without a hitch. Terrie Powers (my wife) beamed with pride as crowds of fans congratulated her on another fantastic set.
(From left to right: Michael Goodwin, 'Rick Gray, Brad Tuggle, Chris Evans, Jackie Jones, John Moon and Robin Arthur)

If you weren’t there for Opening, you have six weeks to get caught in the Deathtrap before it becomes just another scream in the night. After breaking all records as the longest-running thriller in Broadway history (5 years), Deathtrap promises to be a hot Barksdale ticket during this most haunting time of year.

It was a great Opening. Hope you’ll call 282-2620 for your tickets today!

--Bruce Miller

Happy Half-Birthday to the Buzz

Posted by Bruce Miller

Tomorrow marks the sixth month anniversary of the Barksdale Blog--although I suspect you can't have an "anni" anything until you've reached at least a year. But as all parents know, up to the second birthday you always count by months.

So here we are. It will be six months ago tomorrow, on March 15, that we began this cyber adventure. You can click into our archives to revisit that first blog entry and almost every posting since.

I say “almost” because a few articles that found their way onto our blog for brief periods of time are no longer with us. For example, there was some blog editing (purging?) late at night on July 23, the “most read” day in our brief blog lifetime. During the course of that day we experienced a riot of anonymous comments, a few of which were fairly intense about our theatre or one or another of our respected colleague theatres.

As word of the riot spread around town—and wouldn’t you know I was the last to hear—a record 315 people logged on to view the carnage. When I discovered what was happening, I shut down the blog, temporarily, removed the posts that somehow prompted the blood bath and scrubbed them of all incendiary comments before reposting them the next day.

In another instance—I believe it was on August 6—I wrote what I considered to be an affectionate and respectful (but also satirical) post in homage to Robin Arthur. A few days before I had written some favorable comments about Henry IV, Part I at Richmond Shakespeare. Jacquie O’Connor, who was in IV/I, quite naturally wanted people to come see it. So she was encouraging friends to read my blog entry. Robin Arthur, it turns out, is blog averse, so she finally turned to Jacquie and said, “Jacquie, I wouldn’t read Bruce Miller’s blog if he wrote about my #&*@* !”

Now, I’ve learned my lesson and therefore substituted all those punctuation marks for the word Robin used, a word that is synonymous with “burro.” And "buttocks."

Robin told me this story herself so that I would get a good laugh out of her blog aversion, rather than hear the story through the grapevine and assume that she was intending to speak ill of me. I thought the story was a hoot. I also thought that the gauntlet had been thrown down.

I was determined to write a blog post about Robin’s … “burro.”

So I did. Just for fun. It was titled ROBIN ARTHUR’S ASS in big bold letters. And let me remind you all that “ass” is a perfectly acceptable word that I’ve read from the pulpit of my church. It’s a word that’s included in the script of Peter Pan, which Theatre IV will be producing this spring. It’s the moniker that Peter tells us Tinker Bell has assigned to Wendy. If you play the old Mary Martin tape from the Peter Pan TV special of the 1950s, you’ll hear it loud and clear ... with no one objecting.

But the language police are a lot pickier now than they were in the 50s, more’s the pity. So when my blog post told the tender story of Robin’s pet donkey, recounting it’s many adventures and including quite a few fun photos I found on line, the ladies in our Marketing Department, who are far more wise than I, reminded me that the Barksdale blog reaches out to all kinds of people who may be somewhat less “accepting” than we crazy theatre types. They suggested that perhaps I should disseminate my satire in a less public forum. They were of course right; the post went down.

But I saved it as a word document. So, if anyone really wants to read it and see the photos, just drop me a line and I’ll send it to you in a plain brown email.

Are all such blog purges the equivalent of censorship and therefore inherently evil? Yes. Do we do it anyway? Yes. Hey, business is business.

Basically, we’re learning the blog business as we go along. We're making some mistakes, and we're certainly not pleasing everybody. I know I still tend to be too long winded and formal (BORING is the word one commenter chose to put in all caps). Others on our blog tend to write far more whimsically and/or shorter. Hopefully we find a balance.

I know we sometimes post content too frequently for some (my pal Mr. Timberline comes to mind), too sparingly for others. Some want our blog to be more "educational," some want a good deal less of that. We appreciate all opinions and points of view. The business studies we're reading suggest that daily postings and multiple perspectives increase blog readership. Readership is what we're after.

Our prodigal Heifetz ("giving in abundance") has brilliantly suggested some 15-second video blog posts that we're going to be trying soon to promote our various productions.

And here’s where you come in. Now that we’ve established critical mass (138 blog posts; 719 people, shows, companies and places etc. indexed in our labels), we want to invite any and all of you to submit blog posts to us. Just write whatever you want to put out there, and email it to j.daugherty@barksdalerichmond.org with the word BLOG in the subject line. If the posts you submit contain content related to professional theatre in Metro Richmond or beyond, and/or if we think your post will be of interest to the Richmond theatre community, we’ll likely publish it. The exceptions will be blog posts that we consider to be mean spirited about our theatre, our artists, or any of our respected colleagues, be they individuals or organizations.

We cordially invite you to join us in the merry mayhem of blog land. Tell us your stories about theatres and productions of days gone by. Tell us what your life is like after moving from Richmond into a larger or smaller market. Tell us how you’re doing in college, or what it felt like to perform with that company in Idaho. Or Poughkeepsie. Tell us your opinion of what we could or should be doing better. We’re open to any and all voices; we welcome your input.

Six months from now, when we hit our One Year Anniversary, we hope you’ll consider the Barksdale Buzz to be YOUR blog too, not just ours.

--Bruce Miller

PS - Should you venture into the archives and discover that many of the pictures are still down, be assured that we know this and will be working, over time, on their restoration. Thanks.

The Stratford and Shaw Festivals - Great Canadian Theatre

Posted by Bruce Miller
I returned on Monday from a five-day trip to Ontario, Canada. I was fortunate enough again this year to be able to make my pilgrimage to the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, the two largest repertory theatres on the continent. This time, for the first time, I went by myself, without Terrie and the kids and without Phil. I discovered, to no one’s surprise, that solitary theatre sojourns are not my thing. Nonetheless, it was a valuable and enjoyable experience.

I flew out of Richmond last Wednesday morning via Jet Blue into Buffalo, rented a car and drove the three or so hours to the quiet town of Stratford, Ontario--on the Avon, of course, complete with swans. I checked into my B & B at around 6 pm, the Palmyra House, www.bbcanada.com/3865.html, owned and operated by Steve and Meg Garden-Smith. My room and my very friendly, accommodating hosts couldn’t have been nicer. The photos on the Palmyra House website don’t do the beautiful home justice. I recommend the accommodations, the breakfast, and most especially the Garden-Smiths without reservation. Almost immediately after checking in, I walked to my first show. All Stratford theatres are within an easy walking distance from the comfortable and peaceful Palmyra House.

I saw shows at Stratford on the following schedule: Wednesday 8 pm – A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee (Tom Patterson Theatre), Thursday 2 pm – My One and Only by the Gershwins etc. (Avon Theatre), Thursday 8 pm – An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (Festival Theatre - pictured below), Friday 2 pm – The Odyssey by Derek Walcott (Studio Theatre).

I admired A Delicate Balance, which featured an amazing performance by David Fox as Tobias; I enjoyed My One and Only, but remembered why I had forgotten so much of the original Broadway production—it’s forgetable. I went nuts over An Ideal Husband, and absolutely hated not having anyone with me to talk to when the show was over—nothing worse for me than seeing a great show and having to keep my feelings to myself. I didn’t like The Odyssey at all, despite Derek Walcott having won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

After The Odyssey, I hopped into my Toyota Corolla and headed to Niagara-on-the-Lake, a gorgeous, flower-festooned town not far from Niagara Falls, and home to the Shaw Festival. I tend to stay at whatever accommodations are most affordable, and at the Shaw Festival that meant staying at the Comfort Inn in St. Catharine’s, a small city about 15 minutes east. There are some beautiful B & B’s in Niagara-on-the-Lake, but the ones that were available when I booked my room were outside my budget.

I took Friday night off, and then saw Shaw Festival productions on this schedule: Saturday 12 noon – The Kiltartan Comedies by Lady Augusta Gregory (Courthouse Theatre), Saturday 2 pm – The Philanderer by Bernard Shaw (Royal George Theatre), Saturday 8 pm – Summer and Smoke by Tennessee Williams (Royal George Theatre), Sunday 2 pm – Hotel Peccadillo adapted from Georges Feydeau (Festival Theatre), Sunday 8 pm – The Cassilis Engagement by St John Hankin (Courthouse Theatre).

I loved The Kiltartan Comedies, two folksy, very Irish one acts; I enjoyed The Philanderer, although I thought it became a little talky in Acts II and III, and I wasn’t sure where Shaw was trying to go with it. You could tell it was only his third play. I went nuts over Summer and Smoke, and again, missed my accustomed post-theatre fellowship in a neighborhood bar. Hotel Peccadillo started out fun (and wild and crazy), but seemed to me to run out of steam in the last third of Act I and all of Act II. I very much enjoyed The Cassilis Engagement, especially since I knew nothing of the show or the playwright before last week.

One of the best things about the Stratford and Shaw Festivals is the caliber of the acting. Many of the greatest U. S. actors relocate to New York and/or L. A. In Canada, the greatest actors seem to be drawn to Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake, at least in season.

The best known name in the Stratford company is Brian Bedford (pictured to the left), who is internationally recognized as one of the finest English speaking actors alive in the world today. (I saw Mr. Bedford with Tammy Grimes in the Broadway revival of Private Lives in about 1970, and I still remember it as the funniest play I’ve ever seen.) But aside from Mr. Bedford, the majority of the actors in both companies are first-rate, world-class talents. It’s great fun to see your favorites in one show, and then see them in a different show that evening or the next day, and barely be able to discern that you’re watching the same person.

Another great thing about the festivals is that you can see two or three shows a day, every day except Monday. I saw nine shows in four and a half days of playgoing. That's my kind 'a town.

My favorite thing about the festivals is the play selection. Go to Broadway these days, and almost everything is a musical. At the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, you can see Broadway-caliber productions of the wonderful but often less familiar plays of the world’s greatest playwrights. Of the nine shows I saw this trip, eight were shows I’d never seen before.

And, of course, I didn’t see everything. What I missed due to limitations of time and money were world-class productions of Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein), King Lear (Shakespeare), To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), Othello (Shakespeare), The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), St. Joan (Shaw), Mack and Mabel (Jerry Herman etc.), The Circle (Maugham), A Month in the Country (Turgenev/Friel), and a couple other less familiar titles.

Fun fact: the Stratford Festival opened on July 13, 1953, 19 days before the founding of Barksdale Theatre. Fun coincidence: at my last performance, I caught up with Scott Nogi (pictured to the right), the very talented actor who appeared in Theatre IV’s production of The Music Man when he was still a student at Godwin High School in the mid-90s. Scott went on to get his BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU in 2001, studied with RADA in London, and is now forging a wonderful career as an actor, director and fight choreographer in NYC. He was visiting the Shaw Festival with his beautiful wife, Haley, and was gracious enough to re-introduce himself to me. Hopefully, we’ll be able to reconnect with Scott soon here at Barksdale.

--Bruce Miller

Femme Fatale / Femme Fantastique

Posted by Bruce Miller

As we prepare to open The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, the latest production in Barksdale’s ongoing Women’s Theatre Project, I’m revisiting the four remarkable women playwrights whose work made it onto the Barksdale stage between 1953 and 1962. Last week I profiled Nancy Mitford (see Barksdale’s First Woman Playwright – Nancy Mitford, Sept. 6). This week, I introduce to you a second woman author who is now remembered as a feminist pulp fiction pioneer and the author of the glitzy showbiz story of Cole Porter’s final musical for film or stage.

VERA CASPARY (1899 – 1987)

It took help from my pal Jackie Jones and the Boston Public Library to find the handsome photo of Vera Caspary that is pictured to the right. And then it cost me $20! But it's worth it to know that Ms Caspary will now show up on Google Images for the first time because of this blog.

Unlike Diana Mitford, Vera Caspary wasn’t famously wealthy, glamorous or socially connected. Yet she danced around the edges of some of the more important events and celebrated people of her time, and emerged as one of the most progressive and successful woman authors of the 20th Century.

Vera Caspary was born in Chicago in 1899. She grew up in a middle class neighborhood next door to Ferdinand Barnett, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and their four children. Mr. Barnett was a lawyer and the founder of Chicago’s first black newspaper. Ms Wells-Barnett (pictured to the left) was a nationally prominent journalist and anti-lynching activist.

A former slave, Ms Wells-Barnett was sought out as an impassioned speaker for civil rights, both in the United States and abroad. She founded the first African American suffragist organization, and was a founding member of the “Committee of 40,” a group of national activists that evolved into the NAACP. Within two years of joining she left the Committee because she felt they were not revolutionary enough.

Vera Caspary was completely taken with her next door neighbors and their progressive politics. At the age of 17, Ms Caspary left high school, took a secretarial course and began earning her living writing advertising copy. She soon felt unfulfilled by this position, and turned her attentions to writing fiction addressing serious social themes.

Her first novel, The White Girl, concerned a black woman from the South who tries to pass for white when she moves north. Her second novel, Thicker than Water, focused on a Jewish family from Chicago. Her first play, Blind Mice, told the story of Chicago’s young working women who lived together in Rolfe House, the low income residence where she herself resided. Blind Mice was not commercially successful, but it took Ms Caspary to Broadway just as she was entering her 30s.

Paramount optioned Blind Mice, reset it in New York City, and filmed it as Working Girl in 1931. (A still from the film is pictured to the right.) Clearly ahead of its time, Working Girl is a subversively funny film laced with an ironic view of marriage, work and class. Film scholar Judith Mayne calls it "perhaps the most daring and innovative film Arzner (the film's acclaimed woman director) ever made." Using this as her calling card to Hollywood, Ms Caspary next wrote the story and the screenplay for The Night of June 13th, a romantic murder mystery of sorts that became her first real commercial success.

In many of her books, especially those from the late '30s, Ms Caspary's heroines were career women, or women attempting to juggle romance and independence, very similar to her own situation. In 1943, Ms Caspary’s career took a giant leap forward when she wrote the novel Laura, which was licensed by 20th Century Fox and turned into a movie by producer and director Otto Preminger. Laura marked a return to the hard-boiled romantic mystery genre of her first success. The novel and the movie were so popular that Ms Caspary soon thereafter co-authored with George Sklar a stage version for Broadway. The play was a hit in both New York and London. It was this stage version of Laura that was produced by Barksdale in 1958, starring Burt Edwards, Bernard Schutte, Jay Lundy, Pete Kilgore, Helen Jervey and Muriel McAuley.

Laura had several elements that seemed to come from Ms Caspary's life. The heroine, Laura Hunt, works as a secretary at an advertising agency, but has some daring and ambition. With some unexpected help from columnist Waldo Lydecker (played by Clifton Webb in the film, pictured in the bathtub above and to the right), she becomes a top executive. At the same time, Laura is forced to balance her professional and personal life, a situation with potentially lethal consequences. In the 1940s and still today, the character of Laura was and is the "quintessential femme fatale."

Shortly after the success of Laura, Ms Caspary co-authored the screen adaptation of her hard-hitting feminist crime novel, Bedelia, which was filmed by John Corfield and Isadore Goldsmith, an Austrian-born producer who became Ms Caspary's husband. Bedelia is considered by many to be the original "black widow" crime story. In 1948, she wrote the screenplay for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's movie, A Letter to Three Wives, which was another huge hit for the studio.

In 1950, the right-wing journal Counterattack issued a pamphlet-style book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. Because of her commitment to Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the early civil rights movement, her authorship of several plays and novels dealing progressively with women’s and other social issues, and her marriage to a left-leaning Austrian who left his homeland to oppose the Nazis, Ms Caspary was included among the 151 actors, writers and other arts professionals identified in Red Channels as communist sympathizers. No evidence against her was ever asked for or collected, nonetheless, being named in Red Channels effectively placed Ms Caspary on the Hollywood blacklist.

During the years of the blacklist, she continued to write crime novels with strong women at their center. She also wrote a story about three gorgeous showgirls and the man who connected them with each other.

In the late 50s, Gene Kelly expressed interest in making a movie musical based on this story. Cole Porter (pictured to the left) was asked to write the score. This was to be Cole Porter’s last musical for film or stage. (He wrote Aladdin for television one year later.) The musical film was called Les Girls, or Cole Porter’s Les Girls in the United States. It included the Porter standard, Ca C’est L’Amour. This was the haunting love song that, decades later, Muriel, Randy Strawderman and Jim Bianchi picked for Bricktop to sing to Cole in Act II of Red Hot and Cole.

Today, Ms Caspary’s hard-boiled and yet romantic crime novels (such as Laura and Bedelia) are still in print and selling better than ever. New generations grant these classics considerable acclaim as early examples of feminist pulp fiction. Their paperback covers today (see Bedelia to the right) are reminiscent of 1940s Sam Spade. Also, the Academy Award-winning Les Girls was recently released on DVD as an example of the final years of MGM’s reign as the world's foremost producer of entertaining musicals. Outshining Gene Kelly, the real stars are the film's three leading femmes fantastique: Mitzi Gaynor, Taina Elg and Kay Kendall.

We will be selling these works of Vera Caspary along with the works of our other featured women authors in the lobby throughout the run of The Member of the Wedding. Her classic works are as fresh today as they were in the 40s, and are well worth your consideration.

--Bruce Miller

Barksdale's First Woman Playwright - Nancy Mitford

Posted by Bruce Miller
The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers is the latest production in Barksdale’s ongoing Women’s Theatre Project. In honor of this important initiative, I’ll be profiling over the next few weeks the four remarkable women playwrights who were the first to make it onto the Barksdale stage. Their plays were produced in Barksdale's first decade – 1953 through 1962.

During that time, Barksdale produced 55 mainstage productions, but only four of the plays were written by women. The authors were Nancy Mitford, Vera Caspary, Mary Hayley Bell, and Anne Nichols. You may or may not recognize their names, but I’m certain you’ll be fascinated by their stories. Their strong-willed, many-faceted lives were emblematic of women playwrights in general during the middle years of the 20th Century.

NANCY MITFORD (1904 – 1973)

Nancy Mitford was Barksdale’s first woman playwright. She wrote the English adaptation of The Little Hut (based on La petite hutte, a popular French comedy by Andre Roussin). The Little Hut is the most frequently produced play in Barksdale’s history. Pete, Muriel and Nancy LOVED The Little Hut, producing it in 1957, 58, 59, 64 and 78.

The Little Hut is Nancy Mitford’s only stage play, but she was a prolific and popular British novelist and biographer. The original production ran for two years in Paris; Ms. Mitford’s English adaptation ran for three years in London, becoming a huge British hit. In 1953, it flopped on Broadway. In 1956, it was made into a poorly received film starring Ava Gardner, David Niven and Stewart Granger.

The story of The Little Hut concerns an independent, self-sufficient woman from Britain’s aristocracy who is stranded after a shipwreck on a deserted island with her husband and her lover. Soon thereafter, she becomes the object of the affections of a primal island native as well. When the aristocratic manners and primitive aggressions of all the men come to naught, it is the woman who must figure out how to save the day.

Nancy Mitford herself was born into the British aristocracy in 1904. She was the first of six daughters of Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the second Baron Redesdale (pictured to the right), who lived with Lady Redesdale at the family estate in Oxfordshire. Despite their pedigree (and inherited fortune), Lord and Lady Redesdale were uneducated and made no effort to educate their beautiful daughters. “We girls were taught only to ride and to speak French,” Nancy Mitford wrote. “I grew up as ignorant as an owl, came out in London, and went to a great many balls.”

Relentlessly pursuing self-education, Ms. Mitford became a tireless reader and soon joined the society ranks referred to by Evelyn Waugh as the “Bright Young Things” of the London social scene between the wars.

Nancy Mitford’s parents were fiercely conservative, and supported the British Union of Fascists. After WWI, the Baron purchased a Canadian mining operation and named it The Swastika Gold Mine. Three of the notorious Mitford sisters followed in their parents’ footsteps. Diana Mitford married the British Blackshirt leader Sir Oswald Mosley, and the couple (pictured to the left at a Nazi rally in Germany) was very friendly with Adolph Hitler. In 1940, Diana was interned at Croydon Airport on her way to Germany. An affectionately autographed photo of the Fuhrer was found in her luggage.

The German wedding of a second sister, Unity Mitford, was secretly held in the office of propaganda minister Josef Goebbels and Hitler was among the guests. When Hitler declared war against England, Unity attempted suicide, stating that Hitler had personally promised her that the declaration would never take place. (The photo to the right shows Unity and Diana partying with SS soldiers in Nuremberg.)

A third sister, Pamela Mitford, was also a Nazi sympathizer. (In the photo to the left, she's the Mitford sister on top.) Recently released pre-war records from MI5 indicate that it was Nancy Mitford herself (our playwright) who informed the British authorities about her three fascist sisters. “My sister Pamela and her husband Derek Jackson,” Nancy wrote in her report to the British government, “have been heard to declare that all Jews in England should be killed and that the war should be stopped now before we lose any more money.”

Nancy Mitford was a moderate socialist and an English patriot, and her sister Jessica was an outspoken communist. They despaired over the family’s fascism and treasonous activities. They both became noted writers, Nancy in England and France and Jessica in the U. S.

Nancy Mitford is best known for her comic novels affectionately satirizing upper-class life in England and France. Her two most popular books are The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which were combined to make a BBC television serial in 2002. Later in her life, Ms. Mitford wrote popular biographies and histories. Even three decades after her death, she is still a beloved British writer, and most of her books remain in print today.

Ms. Mitford’s first romantic relationship was with the homosexual Scottish aristocrat Hamish St Clair-Erskine. She later married Peter Rodd, the youngest son of the 1st Baron Rennell, supposedly a one-time lover of Oscar Wilde. Although they remained friendly throughout their lifetimes, the Rodds separated in the late 30s, and eventually divorced in 1958.

During WWII, Ms. Mitford found the love of her life in a French soldier and politician, Colonel Gaston Palewski, Charles de Gaulle’s Chief of Staff (pictured to the left). At the end of the war, Ms. Mitford moved to Paris to be near “The Colonel.” Her somewhat unrequited devotion did not end until 1969 when Palewski married a beautiful American railroad heiress.

In 1972, as governments became aware of her illness, Ms. Mitford was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and an Officer in the French Legion of Honor. Palewski was asked to invest her with her French title during the formal ceremonies. He was also at her bedside on the day she died.

Ms. Mitford’s books are still beloved, and we will have copies on sale in the Barksdale lobby during the run of The Member of the Wedding. We hope you will check out the timeless work of Nancy Mitford--an outstanding author and Barksdale’s first woman playwright.

--Bruce Miller

First Friday's at the Empire!

Posted by Catherine Dudley
I just wanted to let you guys all know… if you’re not coming downtown on the first Friday of every month- you’re missing out! At every event the streets are swarming with people, and the energy is amazing. The restaurants are packed, the art galleries are filled to capacity, the music is spilling out into the streets from numerous storefronts and we, here at the Empire Theatre, are proud to show off our beautiful and historic building. Some months our lobby presents live music from awesome bands around the Richmond area, and some months we have a video montage of several of our past productions playing on a large screen in the lobby. Every month there is a gallery display of some kind- photography, artwork, sculpture, costume display, etc…, but there is always a ton to be seen. The bar is ready to serve, and the theatre space itself is ready to be admired. So come on down and join us every First Friday night, and see what you’ve been missing! The theatre beckons…

(This Friday also come check out a cabaret featuring Keydron Dunn, Russell Rowland, Billy Christopher Maupin, Andrea Ross, Audrey Snyder, Robin Harris-Jones, Janine Serresseque, Corey Davis and Chloe Williams.)

-Catherine Dudley

My Dinner with Bob Porterfield

Posted by Bruce Miller

In the winter of 1968, about six months after Barksdale’s Stop the World residency at Barter (see Barksdale and Barter, Aug 28), and about four months before my high school graduation, I was invited to dinner with Robert Porterfield--"please call me Bob"--Barter’s legendary founder. Here's a photo of Bob (taken about a quarter-century earlier) with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

This was nothing like my mealtime encounter with Arthur Miller (see My Lunch with Arthur Miller, Aug 12), where I sat respectfully and anonymously at his elbow with neither one of us saying a word. This was an animated three-hour dinner conversation with only four of us in the room.

A little background... In high school, I met one of my lifelong friends, Terry Bliss (pictured to the left). She’s co-author with me of Hugs and Kisses, and she works today as a practicing attorney and Artistic Director of North Street Playhouse in Onancock, VA. I was also good friends with Terry’s younger sister, Kathy. Through Terry and Kathy, I became friends with their mother, also named Terry Bliss. Terry Bliss (the mother) was the director of PAVE (Performing Arts in Virginia Education) after it became independent of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and just before it morphed again into the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

Terry Bliss (the mother) is now named Terry Showalter, and doing great things in Harrisonburg, VA.

Terry Bliss (the mother) had met the late Mason Bliss (the father) while he was working as the booking agent for Barter Theatre after WWII. (Below and to the right, you can find a photo of the Barter touring bus from the post-war years, parked in front of the Algonquin Hotel in NYC.)

In 1946, Mason was trying to book a Barter touring production into Limestone College in Gaffney, South Carolina, where Terry headed the theatre department. He didn't win the booking, but apparently he won the heart of the drama chair. Six months after their first meeting, Mason and Terry were married in Abingdon. Southwest Virginia was “dry” in those days, so Ernest Borgnine (pictured to the right) drove to Tennessee to pick up the wedding champagne. Bob Porterfield was the Best Man. The happy couple moved into the Barter Inn, company housing for the theatre. It was in the Barter Inn that Terry Bliss (the daughter) was conceived and lived the first several months of her life.

Soon after his daughter’s birth, Mason Bliss needed to earn money. He established The House of Bliss Celebrity Bureau, Inc.—yes, that really was the name—and he moved his family to Richmond. From here he ran one of only three producing and nationally touring theatre operations to be located outside of New York or Los Angeles. Terry (the mother) was a respected local actress. (A photo of her on the cover of a Richmond Summer Theatre playbill appears above and to the left.) Each year The House of Bliss would produce touring productions starring the likes of Pernell Roberts, Dennis King, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Hal Holbrook. Google ‘em if you’re too young to know who they are.

When Mason died in the mid-60s, the House of Bliss died with him. Terry (the mother) went on to direct the state agency PAVE, and it was her job to book arts programs into Virginia’s schools. She relied on her good friend Bob Porterfield and the artists from The House of Bliss to help her with her job.

In 1968, Bob Porterfield was coming to Richmond, and he called Terry Bliss (the mother) to invite himself over for an evening’s meal. She told him about her daughters’ friend (that would be me), a high school student who was, as Moss Hart famously said, "drunk" on “the smell of the theatre.” Bob was renowned for how much he enjoyed talking with students who wanted to go into theatre professionally. He encouraged her to include me in their get together.

Terry (the daughter) was off in college, so Terry (the mother), Kathy, Bob and I met for dinner in February, and the rest of my life was molded, at least in part, in that one funny, moving and passionate conversation.

Bob spoke enthusiastically about the founding of Barter, and about his good friends Pete and Nancy Kilgore and Muriel McAuley (who, at that time, I had yet to meet). He expressed how much he admired Barksdale, because they were going through so much of what he went through in Barter's early days. He professed that theatre was the noblest vocation anyone could accept, and convinced me that, should I decide to pursue such a career, it would be a privilege and an honor that I could not take lightly.

He discussed the work that he and others had done with President Kennedy to create the National Endowment for the Arts, which had finally been established by President Johnson only three years prior to our dinner. Bob passionately believed that encouraging and showcasing artistic excellence would rekindle America’s creative energy, enrich a national cultural landscape that he believed was in danger of stagnation, and engender in average Americans an understanding of what true civilization really meant.

He believed that, due to our nation’s emerging prosperity, we in the U. S. had inherited from Europe the responsibility of being the caretaker of Western culture. He was convinced that the best way to lure developing countries away from communism and toward democracy was through artistic expression, a tool that the Russians were funding at the time with unparalleled vigor.

Decades before the social economist Richard Florida began discussing the "creative class," Bob Porterfield (pictured in the pencil portrait to the left) discussed American business’s need for the creative education and inspiration that only an arts-rich environment can provide.

It was heady stuff. It changed my life.

Bob Porterfield, Pete and Nancy Kilgore, and Muriel McAuley were great leaders not only because of the institutions they founded and sustained, and certainly not only because of the plays they produced. They were great leaders because of the imaginations they ignited, the opportunities they provided, and the dreams they applauded, encouraged and embraced.

I am forever in their debt.

--Bruce Miller

Addendum: On the "Six Degrees" front, Bob Porterfield's secretary at Barter was Byrd Jervey. When Mason Bliss founded The House of Bliss, Byrd accepted a job as his secretary, moving with him back to Richmond so that she could be closer to her sister. Her sister was Helen Jervey, who was Muriel's first friend and office mate at AAA, and would subsequently become a legendary Barksdale All Star, beginning with Barksdale's first mainstage production, Gold in the Hills.

Barksdale's Women's Theatre Project

Posted by Bruce Miller

As I begin my seventh season as Barksdale’s Artistic Director, the question I’m asked most frequently is, “How do you decide which plays to produce?” The process has so many layers (and so many players) it requires its own publication.

Part of the answer, however, involves a key commitment we made when we began selecting our first Barksdale Season in 2001-02. We pledged to ourselves, our artists and our audiences that we would, each season, produce at least:
· one work by a woman author,
· one work staged by a woman director, and
· one work that focuses on a strong, central woman.

We call this commitment our Women’s Theatre Project. The Member of the Wedding by the brilliant and legendary Southern author, Carson McCullers (pictured below and to the right), will open our Signature Season at Willow Lawn on September 21. It is a part of this Project.

At first glance, the commitment seems hardly necessary. What theatre wouldn’t, without even trying, produce such a season? And yet, if you review Barksdale’s history prior to 2001 and Richmond theatre history in general up to today, you’ll find that the majority of seasons fail to meet these minimal standards.

In the last seven seasons, we’re proud to have selected 15 plays and musicals by women authors. Several of these productions have been among our biggest hits, including The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman, Annie Get Your Gun co-written by Dorothy Fields, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Crowns by Regina Taylor, and Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage—to mention only a few.

We’re proud that sixteen of our plays and musicals have been directed by leading women artists, including Robin Arthur, Nancy Cates, Jan Guarino, Leslie Owens Harrington, Susan Sanford, K Strong, Dawn Westbrook and Keri Wormald.

We’re proud of the powerful starring roles performed on our stage by Kathy Halenda, Dorothy Holland, Kelly Kennedy, Liz Mamana, Adanma Onyedike, Robyn O’Neill, Jill Bari Steinberg, Erin Thomas, Harriet Traylor and Irene Ziegler (to name a few), setting a standard for strong, active images of women.

In The Member of the Wedding, actress Katherine Louis (pictured to the left) and playwright Carson McCullers will join this roll of honor. We hope you’ll recognize, appreciate and support the commitments of our Women’s Theatre Project.

Throughout the run of Wedding, we will be exploring the issue of Women and the Arts in our Coffee & Conversations series, our new Cocktail Hour Conversations program, and here on the blog. Please join us in the discussion.

--Bruce Miller