When Lisa Speidel joined the Sexual Assault Resource Agency in the early 1990s, she had no idea her work in sexual assault prevention would lead to a career in sex education. But one graduate program, one assistant professorship, and 27 years teaching women’s self-defense later, she’s become an advocate for sexual awareness as a path […]
What do you do when structures fail? When you did everything right, you played by the rules, yet the safety you thought you’d shored up for the future disappears with a twist of fate? In The Humans, a Tony Award-winning comedy-drama by playwright Stephan Karam, characters wrestle to find peace and connection amidst the rumbles […]
The year is 1995, “Friends” is all the rage, and Tilly Evans is “the most uncommon form of nerd in the world”—a girl-nerd who loves Dungeons & Dragons. So begins She Kills Monsters, the 2011 comedy-drama by Qui Nguyen. Known for his innovative use of pop culture, stage violence, puppetry, and multimedia, Nguyen transports us […]
A little boy stares into a river while ghostly shadows move through the current. The long, lithe bodies could be lost souls or river spirits, past lives or unspoken dreams, but whatever life force they represent, they’re rushing onward away from the boy—and away from you, the passive observer. The headline reads, “What we do […]
When it comes to creating a feature-length movie on the silver screen, animation studios like Pixar deploy millions of dollars and hundreds of people to make the magic happen. Well buckle up, Hollywood, because one local teen did it right from his basement studio in Louisa. Fourteen-year-old homeschooler Jack Buckley created what he believes to […]
If you’ve seen a parade of 8-foot-tall ants climbing the side of a building, a life-sized foam replica of Stonehenge, or a T-Rex lunging through the trees with a Union soldier in its mouth, then you know the work of Mark Cline. Dubbed “Virginia’s Roadside Attraction King” by Atlas Obscura, Cline has spent decades building […]
When you think of teenage girls, what do you picture? Perhaps you think of your own fast-talking children or your experience in high school. Or maybe you default to cliques and clichés: prom queens and geeks, victims and villains. In its latest production, a Pulitzer Prize- nominated play by Sarah DeLappe called The Wolves, Live […]
When playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov arrived on the Russian literary scene in the late 1800s, he changed the course of modern drama. According to Boomie Pedersen, artistic director of the Hamner Theater in Nelson County, Chekhov’s work meant that “theater went from being larger-than-life declamatory screaming to the back rows, to much […]