First, here's the press release to tell you more about the show:
The long-awaited premiere of the new Dan Kehde play, Shadowman, arrives 8 p.m. Thursday, July 23 at the historic WVSU Capitol Center, 123 Summers Street, Charleston.To explain why they're tackling such a dark, adult subject, here's a powerful message from the show's creator, Dan Kehde:
After more than three years in development, the play centers around the sin and redemption of a convicted rapist Jeremiah Fleetwood as he returns to his home town after 15 years in prison. Hired as counter man in the local pornography shop, Fleetwood confronts his victim, his former friends and the town sheriff before discovering that his only possible act of redemption is even more heinous than his original crime.
Featuring the talents of veteran actors Evan Wilson, Erin Martin, Nik Tidquist, Madeleine Ranson, Michelle Spencer, Shawn Casey, Kirill Gura and Shane Belcher, the drama is adult themed and not suitable for children.
Performances run July 23-25, 30, 31 and August 1 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $5.50 for Students/seniors and $9.50 for adults, and are available the evenings of the performances.
From the Playwright...
With every new play I write come the same old questions: “Why do you do this? Why aren’t you doing shows that people want to come to see? You could make a lot of money if you just did Jesus Christ Superstar again or Across the Universe. Nobody wants to come to the theater to see depressing drama anymore. Why do it?” You’ve heard it. Some of you may even have asked me those questions yourselves.
So, why are we going to premiere Shadowman, another depressing drama?
Okay. Because, at its core, live theater is not about entertainment, despite the fact that the living stage is often the venue for it. If live theater were only about soliciting audience, then the concept of the stage would have been altered or replaced altogether after the first Olympics, or the first time the lions devoured the Christians, or the first public crucifixion, or the first Super Bowl, the first time the Beatles played Yankee Stadium, or any other first time a crowd gathered to watch a spectacle.
Conversely, if live theater were only about money, then its works would reflect only the most superficial values of the current generation. And while those pieces must always exist, it would be insulting to consider them the sole purpose for a three thousand year old institution.
No, the true potential of the living stage is for the constant confrontation of ideas and emotions to the human condition, whether humanity is in the mood to see it or not. The living stage is where audiences see themselves not as a mirror images, but as portraits: the interpretations of an artist/playwright, where all the warts and faults and failings can be highlighted or erased at the whim of the writer who creates it and actors who portray it.
There is no place in the world that can equal the sheer intimate power of the living stage. No movie theater, TV screen, stadium or coliseum can offer an audience anything near to the experience of sitting within 20 feet of human beings creating the human experience.
And regardless of the harshness of the civilization, or its technological advancements, in spite of war, the dark ages, and threat of nuclear annihilation, the living stage continues to exist because it holds a place in human artistry - in human existence - like no other.
What I do isn’t new. It isn’t even unique. (And oftentimes it may not even be very good.) There are hundreds of playwrights all over the world right now writing for the living stage, using plot, character and dialog to portray the human condition, striving to create moments so powerful that the actors and the audiences breathe and cry as one being, so moving that even the silences between the words are remembered long after the final curtain, and written with such discomfiting honesty that audiences must often times look away. But that is the purpose of the living stage and it must be acknowledged. It must be remembered.
For just as a thousand amateur groups in this country will be recreating Oklahoma to the delight of their resident communities this summer, there will also be playwrights like me, who, far from the pressures and constraints of the community standards of the day, are defiantly creating new dramas that, in their own ways, remind the members of their audiences, however few, just how irreplaceable the living stage is, and just how powerful the living stage can be.
So come. Be part of something you’ll see no place else.
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